Brownie in Beirut

For those paying attention, the current crisis in the Middle East is once again showing the true face of conservative government in all its ineptitude and squalor. The dazzling performance standards we all came to know and love during hurricane Katrina are on full, lavish display on the Levant.

First, the delayed reaction time. As MSNBC reported on Saturday, Americans in Lebanon, including students at Beirut's American University, were caught completely unprepared by the outbreak of hostilities. The reaction of the Department of State was to say, almost in as many words, that the 25,000 Americans in Lebanon were on their own.

"There aren't any ... reliable ways to get out by air, land or sea," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Friday. U.S. citizens are being told to "assess what is best for their own personal security."

Savor that for a second. You're trapped in a war zone, and the government says you're on your own. Does this principle sound at all familiar?

But as always, it gets better.

During the crucial first days of the crisis, the United States Embassy in Beirut was sitting on its hands, as this email demonstrates:

The U.S. embassy has been anything but helpful these last few days. When I finally got through to a human being last night he told me the embassy was closed, to try back tomorrow, and made me feel that I was crazy for even asking about an evacuation plan. Needless to say I spent the night terrified listening to fighter jets and bombs and awoke to an endless busy signal whenever I call their number. This is a common experience among all other Americans I've run into here.

Not to belabor the point excessively, but one of the core functions of any embassy, especially in parts of the world prone to instability, is to keep track of U.S. citizens and to advise them in matters pertaining to their stay in a foreign country. Anyone who's ever lived abroad for a significant amount of time, as I have, knows this. According to the mission statement of the DoS, the safety of Americans abroad is part of their job:

Additionally, the State Department issues passports, provides travel information on any country, helps you do business abroad, teaches about other cultures through exchange programs, answers inquiries about a U.S. relative abroad, assists in foreign adoptions, assists when a child has been abducted from the U.S., helps if a U.S. citizen dies overseas, assists when an American citizen is arrested abroad, and evacuates people from dangerous situations abroad. [Emphasis added]

The government is finally acting, several days after the crisis began, to secure our citizens, including forty teenage college students trapped in an unsecured dorm that the embassy didn't even know about, because they weren't answering their phones. As an aside, given that this crisis started with a kidnapping, we should consider ourselves lucky that Hezbollah didn't raid the unsecured dorm where those kids were or are staying.

Problem is, as Liza points out below, your government is expecting evacuees to pay for their evacuation from a war zone. You see, under a conservative government, there is no free lunch, or even a free evacuation from a shooting war. That would be wishy-washy entitlement liberalism, which went out of style with those massive tax cuts.

Back in the real world, of course, considering that the goal of an evacuation is to get people out, adding a price tag creates a disincentive for people to take the preferred course of action, which is getting the hell out of Beirut. You don't need to be Metternich to understand that some college student with a few dozen grand in student loans may think twice about getting on a plane the government expects to be paid for providing. You don't create financial barriers to entry for an evacuation because you want it to be revenue-neutral – that's why we pay taxes.

If you're looking for a single example of why conservative government inevitably produces crappy policy, this is it.

While all of this is going down, needless to say, the guy who ran on keeping us all safe from harm is talking trash in Saint Petersburg. Granted, that's a step up from chilling at the ranch and playing the guitar; but come November, voters will have a chance to say whether the Katrina government is good enough for their tastes. If voters needed a reminder that conservatives just can't govern, all they need to do is turn on their televisions.

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