[Mb-civic] This Is 'Fully Prepared'? - Eugene Robinson - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

This Is 'Fully Prepared'?

By Eugene Robinson
Friday, March 3, 2006; A17

"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."

George W. Bush said those words to Diane Sawyer last Sept. 1, when 
desperate people in flooded New Orleans were still being rescued from 
their roofs. Now we know that just four days earlier, in a 
videoconference briefing, one of the nation's leading hurricane experts 
had explicitly warned that failure of the protective levees was "a very, 
very grave concern."

We also know that in his final briefing before Hurricane Katrina hit, 
the president did not ask a single question. He did, however, reassure 
local officials that help would soon be on the way. "I want to assure 
the folks at the state level that we are fully prepared," Bush said.

Given what happened over the following week, all I can say is: Be 
afraid. Be very afraid.

At least now I know why the White House is so obsessively secretive 
about its decision-making process. The leaked videotapes and transcripts 
of pre-Katrina briefings that were obtained this week by the Associated 
Press leave in tatters the defining myth of the Bush administration -- 
an undeserved aura of cool, unflinching competence and steely resolve. 
Instead, the tapes show bureaucratic inertia and a president for whom 
delegation seems to mean detachment.

The briefings were held as satellite photos showed monstrous Katrina 
practically filling the whole Gulf of Mexico, and there was nothing that 
could have been done to save the Gulf Coast from a terrible blow. 
However, there was much that could have been done to organize and 
support evacuation, rescue and relief efforts. The federal government 
had learned, for example, that local officials in Louisiana had mounted 
no effective effort to evacuate people from institutions -- hospitals, 
prisons, schools. Yet the federal response was essentially a shrug.

What we didn't know before these tapes came out is how specifically the 
president had been warned of the impending disaster, in all its 
particulars. The story was foretold days before the hurricane made landfall.

The hapless Michael Brown proved to be a disaster as head of the Federal 
Emergency Management Agency, but in the days before Katrina hit he did a 
pretty good job of sounding the alarm. His hair was on fire as he tried 
to get his boss, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, and the 
White House to pay attention and absorb the fact that this was the "big 
one."

The president was attending the briefings via secure video from his 
ranch in Crawford, Tex. After hearing what he heard, how could he have 
told anyone the federal government was "fully prepared" to help? And how 
on earth could he have said days later that no one thought the New 
Orleans levees might fail?

In a way, I'd worry less if I thought the president were being 
intentionally duplicitous. But I worry that somehow he didn't fully take 
in the reality of the situation, let alone its gravity. His response was 
to sign all the right pieces of paper and then reassure others, and 
perhaps himself, that everything was under control when it should have 
been obvious that nothing was under control.

The day after his claim about no one anticipating the failure of the 
levees, when the federal response was still a chaotic and ineffectual 
mess, Bush uttered the immortal line to his foundering FEMA director: 
"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." Did he really believe that?

A chief executive who isolates himself from bad news is one thing. A 
chief executive who hears bad news, in detail, and then plays it back as 
"heck of a job" is something else.

Is there a pattern here? President Bush surely sees, as we all see, that 
Iraq is in danger of falling into the abyss of sectarian civil war. He 
must realize that he got bad advice and tried to occupy the country with 
too few troops, making calamitous mistakes along the way. He surely sees 
the continuing violence in Afghanistan as the Taliban tries to regroup 
across the border in Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden is thought to be 
hiding. But he doesn't seem to really grapple with the bad news from the 
multi-front "war on terrorism" he has launched, preferring to 
acknowledge only the spread of democratic institutions.

Some in the administration are now calling it "the long war," which 
indicates no end in sight.

Oh, and health authorities agree that it's just a matter of time before 
the avian flu pandemic reaches U.S. shores. The administration says the 
government is prepared to provide all necessary help to local officials.

Be very afraid.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/02/AR2006030201210.html
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