True story.
I was in Iraq for 15 months as part of the surge (07-08). In Jan 08 we pushed into the Diyala River Valley as part of operation Iron/Raider Harvest.
Our mission was to clear insurgents from Sunni areas near the Iranian border. Saddam gifted land to retired senior officers in this area to provide a Sunni buffer against Shia influence from Iran.
As we started to engage with the population we discovered the newly elected Shia government in Iraq had stopped delivering kerosene and other government-provided goods (yay Socialism!) to this area because these were Sunni/Baathists (Saddam’s political party for you youngsters) and the government felt its role towards these people was to punish them not support them. Part of clearing insurgents is engaging with the local non-insurgent population to convince them we were there to help not harm.
We were well received in this area because we brought the first kerosene delivery in over 18 months (it actually snowed one of the days we were there).
I’ve been thinking about this vignette a lot because elite leftists talk about Americans who reject their worldview as untermensch (the “garbage” comment/the “deplorable” comment) and increasingly view government power as a means to the end of punishing those with whom they disagree.
This FEMA example is one more data point. Like
@SGTiger pointed out the employee was reassigned and not fired. This tells us a great deal about how the larger government views this on the scale of wrong.
