Education Quote by Michael Chertoff

The line lands with the chill of bureaucratic candor accidentally wandering into moral territory. Chertoff is trying to perform competence: Katrina and Rita become case studies, a before-and-after chart where “better” is the point, and “planning” is the proof. The diction is all process and alignment, the kind of language that turns catastrophe into an institutional workout. It’s meant to reassure: we stumbled, we adjusted, we’re coordinated now.

But the subtext is where it curdles. By yoking hurricane lessons to “another attack,” Chertoff collapses natural disaster and terrorism into the same security frame, a hallmark of post-9/11 governance. The Department of Defense isn’t mentioned because the National Weather Service needs backup; it’s invoked as an emblem of seriousness, a promise that force and logistics can substitute for political accountability. The phrase “if we were to have another attack” reads like a verbal misfire, but it reveals an underlying premise: the state’s legitimacy is measured less by preventing suffering than by managing it when it arrives.

Context matters. Katrina (and the botched federal response) had turned emergency management into a public referendum on competence, race, and abandonment. Rita, arriving weeks later, offered officials a chance to audition again, this time with scripts rewritten and chains of command tightened. Chertoff’s intent is damage control. The effect, though, is a stark glimpse of how quickly tragedy becomes a rehearsal for the next one. When “positive things” depend on “another attack,” the sentence exposes a government talking itself into readiness while tiptoeing around the fact that readiness is not the same as care.