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George the Unready
Friday, March 3rd, 2006 by bill
From NY Times
By Paul Krugman

Iraqi insurgents, hurricanes and low-income Medicare recipients have three things in common. Each has been at the center of a policy disaster. In each case experts warned about the impending disaster. And in each case — well, let’s look at what happened.

Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau reports that from 2003 on, intelligence agencies “repeatedly warned the White House” that “the insurgency in Iraq had deep local roots, was likely to worsen and could lead to civil war.” But senior administration officials insisted that the insurgents were a mix of dead-enders and foreign terrorists.

Intelligence analysts who refused to go along with that line were attacked for not being team players. According to U.S. News & World Report, President Bush’s reaction to a pessimistic report from the C.I.A.’s Baghdad station chief was to remark, “What is he, some kind of defeatist?”

Many people have now seen the video of the briefing Mr. Bush received before Hurricane Katrina struck. Much has been made of the revelation that Mr. Bush was dishonest when he claimed, a few days later, that nobody anticipated the breach of the levees.

But what’s really striking, given the gravity of the warnings, is the lack of urgency Mr. Bush and his administration displayed in responding to the storm. A horrified nation watched the scenes of misery at the Superdome and wondered why help hadn’t arrived. But as Newsweek reports, for several days nobody was willing to tell Mr. Bush, who “equates disagreement with disloyalty,” how badly things were going. “For most of those first few days,” Newsweek says, “Bush was hearing what a good job the Feds were doing.”


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Hat tip to Maha