Instead, Bush monitored developments mostly from afar. The White House should have moved mountains to help New Orleanians in need. Bush, furthermore, embarrassed himself by flying down to the Gulf and claiming that “Brownie” was doing “a heck of a job.” Just as New Orleans’s levee system catastrophically failed to work (breaking in about 50 places) Bush had catastrophically failed to save lives.īush’s incompetence was ultimately responsible for the ineffective federal response from August 29 to September 2. Chertoff, for one, acted as if New Orleans wasn’t actually flooding and, instead, went to an avian flu conference in Atlanta. In the immediate aftermath of the storm and its carnage, the president, who was able to find his sea legs the week of 9/11, couldn’t find his gut, much less his heart. More than any other event of his White House tenure, Bush’s slow response to Katrina made Americans ask if he was a “bunker” commander, relying too much on cautious paper pushers such as FEMA’s Michael Brown and Homeland Security’s Michael Chertoff. Instead, Bush acted as though he were disinterested in the natural disaster. Within two years, he charged into the headwinds of a war that cost billions, decimated cities, claimed the lives of thousands of allied service members and hundreds of thousands of citizens and enemy combatants-the ramifications of which we are still confronting, in horrific ways, to this day. Foreign policy and military strategy were not George Bush’s fortes. But soon enough, he was going after Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, whose regime had absolutely zero to do with the 9/11 attacks. When the president emerged, addressing the nation in a formal televised speech, it was in a role in which he was comfortable: the aggressor intent on taking revenge against al-Qaeda, against the Taliban who had harbored them, and against “the people who knocked these buildings down” (as he said, a few days after the attacks, bullhorn in hand, at Ground Zero). After the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, Bush was virtually unseen during the first 11 hours, making only brief statements and effectively ceding the public leadership role in the crisis to New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
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