Pascagoulastan

Today is the 16-year anniversary of landfall of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the Gulf Coast from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle, killing up to 1,836 people and causing $125 billion in damage.  Today, on this grim anniversary, winds and rain and storm surge from Hurricane Ida are lashing the Louisiana coast.

Sixteen years ago, I had spent most of the summer of 2005 working at an oil refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi, only about 100 miles from where Katrina made landfall (although Pascagoula was pretty well devastated by the storm as well).  I would spend the week in Pascagoula, and then fly back to Atlanta from the Mobile, Alabama airport for the weekend.  The Friday before Katrina hit, my client in Pascagoula told me not to return that next Monday until I got an "all clear" call from him after the hurricane had passed.

I didn't hear from him for almost three months.   I honestly didn't know if he was dead or alive, as well as several other friends I had met that summer in Mississippi. Fortunately, everyone I knew survived, although unfortunately, all those survivors lost someone they knew in the storm.

Ida is now an extremely dangerous Category 4 hurricane.  Rapid weakening is expected during the next day or so, however Ida is forecast to remain a hurricane through late tonight. A Florida Coastal Monitoring Observation Tower at South Lafourche Airport reported a sustained wind of 70 mph and a wind gust of 102 mph.  A sustained wind of 47 mph and a gust of 63 mph were recently reported at Lakefront Airport in New Orleans.

As noted yesterday, prior to having to worry about wind and rain and water from Ida, Louisiana had plenty to worry about with the covids. In addition to having the country's third-highest per-capita rate of new cases per day, Louisiana has the third-highest death rate, and the fifth-highest hospitalization rate.

People living on the Gulf Coast from Lake Charles, Louisiana to Pensacola, Florida are being encouraged to evacuate and relocate to Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, and here in Atlanta, Georgia.

On top of having to manage the covid pandemic and the crisis from Hurricane Ida, President Biden is also coping with America's withdrawal from Afghanistan.  I'm no expert on Afghanistan, but I have played over 90 hours of Metal Gear Solid V, which is set in 1980s Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, so I do know a thing or two about the country.  Just kidding - that's meant as a commentary on all of the sudden Central Asian "experts" popping up on social media and talk shows.

For the record, I was against going to Afghanistan in the first place, much less staying there for 20 years.  Not only am I against war in general, but on September 11, 2001, I was on Day 4 of a 7-day mediation retreat, and had a slightly different reaction to the news than most of the rest of the country.  I stayed at the retreat, and missed seeing the continuous footage of planes hitting the World Trade Center on cable news over and over again, missed the vitriolic, Islamophobic rhetoric, and was out of touch with the predominant American opinion that it was time to kick some butt and bomb somebody.  But anyway, I thought then and I still believe now that it was a mistake going in, and anyone thinking there would be a "Farewell Victorious Conqueror" celebration by the Afghans when we left was delusional.

But George W. Bush and successive presidents, both Obama and Trump, wouldn't pull us out of Afghanistan, not because they liked the war or thought it was necessary, but because they didn't want the blame over the inevitable messiness of the withdrawal to fall on them, or their party, or the polling on the next electoral cycle.  Whatever else you might say about Biden's decision-making, at least he realized he had to do what had to be done, regardless of the short- and possibly long-term political price, and has accepted full, "the buck stops here" responsibility for the consequences.

But, still.  It was Trump who bypassed the Afghan government and negotiated directly with the Taliban, agreeing to pull out of Afghanistan by May 2021 and freeing some 5,000 prisoners in exchange for a promise not to fire on any American troops.  Biden could have reversed Trump's policy like he had with others, although there was no putting the genie of the 5,000 free prisoners back in the bottle, but he decided to finally get us out of that country, first by 9/11 and then later by 8/31.

Leaving a war we didn't win is always going to be a messy and dangerous proposition, and if there were an easy or an obvious way to do it, it would have already been done a long time ago.  There are those saying we should have waited until the winter, when Taliban troops can't fight in the snow-capped mountainous terrain, but this misses the fact that there was virtually no fighting during the Taliban's takeover - Afghan forces in many cases simply surrendered without first firing a single shot.  Strategic battle advantage had no role in the collapse or the Afghan defeat, Metal Gear Solid players, and besides, had we stayed, there would inevitably have been some loss of American lives, and how many more troops need to die to fit the Monday morning quarterbacks best-case scenarios?

Abandoning Bagram Air Force Base before full withdrawal was a miscalculation based on the assumption that Afghan forces would at least hold Kabul until all Americans and allies had been evacuated (they didn't).  A withdrawal is always going to be messy no matter what, and hindsight is always better than foresight, but despite the messiness and the hostility and the sudden loss of Afghan support, we've still managed to extract over 100,000 people (and counting) from Afghanistan.  Yes, we were attacked by ISIS terrorists during the process, but we've retaliated so far with two successful drone strikes, one vengeful and the other preemptive. 

It's a sad day when U.S. forces abroad get attacked by terrorists.  It's almost as sad when, instead of expressing support for the surviving troops and celebrating our success at striking back, the opposing political party instead calls for resignation or impeachment of the President, the Vice-President and the Secretary of State. It's sad when some people are so obsessed with their political rivalries, they put those feelings ahead of those for the people who are actually trying to kill us.