Why do we need members of the National Guard patrolling our borders? It is a question, frankly, that doesn’t have a very edifying answer. The National Guard is spread way too thin as it is, and I am not sure how many members are eager to go from two tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan to a new tour in Nogales.

Resident Scholar Norman J. Ornstein

If the response to that is, “Well, we are just sending token numbers”--6,000--the counter-response is, “Why mess with the Guard for token purposes when the results will include sharper tension with Mexico over the issue of militarizing the border and fodder for Hugo Chavez and our other hemispheric adversaries to dump on the imperialist and militaristic USA?” Then there’s the issue of whether anything in the training of the National Guard prepares them for border patrol work, whether on the front lines or back in the office doing paperwork.

Of course, we know the less edifying answers. The president needed a symbol of his determination to toughen the borders in order to pacify his base and to get conservatives in Congress to consider the immigration plan advanced by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) to legalize many of the illegals who have been in the country for years without having to expel 12 million people or more.

This is necessary because the House Republican leadership will not move a bill that has broad bipartisan support if it comes at the expense of losing even a sliver of the party’s ideological base. There is another reason. We need some supplements for the undermanned border patrol forces who are themselves spread way too thin. The failures of the border patrol--not just caused by inadequate numbers but also by dysfunction within their agency and a continuing set of problems with coordinating responsibilities with federal customs and immigration officials--have led to serious public unhappiness in border states, especially Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, and a need for some kind of governmental response.

I find it more disturbing to dwell on the dynamics of this issue after seeing the film United 93 over the weekend. It is a superb movie, and the one-word description of it given by virtually everyone who has seen it--“harrowing”--is accurate. But to a student of government, the harrowing part goes well beyond reliving the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and watching a graphic portrayal of a suicide-hijacking mission. The movie portrays a government in near-chaos, with the limited communication between the Federal Aviation Administration, air traffic controllers and the military filled with misinformation and nearly inexplicable delays. The military was unable to scramble any significant force to protect the airspace around Washington, D.C., for a long time after it became clear that the capital--and the Capitol--were obvious targets of the terrorist attack.

Perhaps others left the theater with a belief that the chaos was understandable; after all, who would have imagined a broad-based, concerted effort by suicidal terrorists to kill thousands of people in coordinated attacks on American soil? Most moviegoers probably felt a small sense of relief that at least now, more than four years later, we have learned some lessons, beefed up the communications among these agencies and the rapid response necessary when another attack occurs. But I did not.

The response by the federal government since Sept. 11 has been reluctant, halting and generally ineffectual in most areas of homeland security. I have no reason to believe that we have had a systematic effort to improve communications and coordination--not just between the FAA and the Pentagon but among other agencies that might be on the front lines in the next attack, which is not likely to come from commercial airliners.

I also know that the creation of the Department of Homeland Security--long after it was clear that the office setup in the White House was inadequate to the task--was done in a textbook fashion, specifically a textbook showing how not to do a major reorganization. Instead of focusing on the problems in border security by integrating the jobs of border patrol, customs, immigration and the Coast Guard, and instead of focusing intensely on crafting a strong bureaucratic culture around their shared missions, the White House and Congress brought together 20 disparate units in a massive reorganization that hasn’t come close to working and will take many more years to become functional.

We saw what happened with Hurricane Katrina, and the problems with the Federal Emergency Management Agency are manifest in the border area and many others. We are woefully unprepared to deal with a biological attack, a pandemic, a massive natural disaster or another broad-based terrorist attack. One is coming--we just don’t know when. United 93 underscores the ominous reality that al-Qaida takes a long time doing its planning before making its move. It is surely planning the next one as I write.

For nearly five years, we drastically have underfunded our first responders while failing to coordinate plans across state and regional lines. We still do not have interoperable communications among first responders. We have underfunded border security despite warnings that immigration issues were intertwined with basic security issues. No wonder this issue has exploded on the national scene, and no wonder we are seeing this belated move to “solve” the problem with a National Guard presence.

Where has Congress been in all of this? For nearly five years, absent without leave. It’s been AWOL on oversight, AWOL on serious legislation to deal with either the lapses in the department or the broader problems of border security, AWOL on serious deliberation about broader immigration issues, AWOL on seeking bipartisan solutions for difficult problems that need some consensus in the middle. And it’s been worse than AWOL in making sure that we have institutions of governance after the next massive attack. Congress’ approval rating is 22 percent? That seems too high.

Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at AEI.