Katrina Victims: Justice is Coming

The Army Corps of Engineers deserves all of the criticism that flood protection experts and I have leveled against the Masters of Disasters. For over a century, the agency has demonstrated that it is unfit for duty as the chief protector of Americans from flooding. The drowning of New Orleans and Midwest flooding are merely the latest tragic chapters in a history of incompetence, arrogance, and waste.

Over a half century ago, one noted historian, Harvard Professor Arthur Maass, concluded:

“[The Army Corps of Engineers policies and procedures for flood protection . . . fail to meet many established procedures for professional responsibility. . . . Since 1936, . . . the Engineer Department has become increasingly involved in very complex operations [that have] the most profound effects upon the social structure and economic welfare of large regions and of the nation as a whole—‘a seemless web: the unity of land and water and men.’ The Corps has failed to grow to the task.”

In the intervening five decades, the Army Corps has devolved into even more of a clear and present danger to life, property, and the environment. This “notoriously dysfunctional” agency (per yesterday’s New York Times) has pillaged the nation’s ecosystem (The Everglades, for one notorious example), drowned Greater New Orleans (over 100 square miles laid to waste and 1,300 dead), and squandered billions of dollars on water projects that were not justified in terms of cost or benefits (Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet and Red River, come to mind). This cadre of military engineers must be drummed out of the federal government because, in the words of Time Magazine Senior Editor Michael Grunwald, of their “dishonest analyses, anachronistic priorities, predilection for makework, and desperation to please its congressional patrons and special-interest clients.” http://grist.org/feature/2008/03/18/grunwald/.

The Army Corps is not the only culprit here.

Congress also deserves a hefty share of the blame for failing to assert civilian control over the military. But Senators and Members of Congress stubbornly refuse to bite the hand that feeds them pork—billions of dollars of water development projects to prove to their constituents what a splendid job they are doing. The annual feeding frenzy of earmarks is an unseemly corruption of their offices.

This sordid state of affairs is not a recent national scandal. After battling the Army Corps for years as Secretary of the Interior for Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, Harold L. Ickes condemned Congress as a co-conspirator in looting the Treasury and ravaging our precious ecosystem:

“If the people of the country were but half aware of the general subserviency of their representatives and senators in Congress to this insubordinate and self-seeking clique, they would quickly demand that Congress reassume its dignity and prestige which have been borrowed surreptitiously by the Army Engineers within which to masquerade. . . . The Congress has not acted out of the toporific effect of the pork barrel.”

Weaning these politicians of pork cannot happen unless the American people first recognize this cancer on democracy and then elect representatives committed to ban pork from the Congressional diet.

Like interdicting terrorists and drug traffickers, this is an urgent matter of national security.