There is no way to avoid the fact that bad things will happen when you are president. It's the way life is. Natural disasters occur, bad people do bad things, and it's a very large country where a lot of things can go wrong at a moment's notice. No president can guarantee 100 percent safety from anything, nor would it be fair to expect it.
Could 9/11 have been prevented? We'll never know for sure (unless LIHOP or MIHOP is someday proven). Could the damage from Katrina been reduced? You can definitely make that case, but it's tough to prove something that's hypothetical.
All I think that you ask from your leadership is the reassurance that everything possible is being done to protect its citizens. When threats loom, you have a REPSONSIBLITY to prepare for the worst. You can hope or pray for the best, but you make damn sure that you are prepared for the worst-case scenario for the good of the citizens. If you over-prepare and things aren't as bad as feared, nobody is hurt and pretty much nobody notices. If you ignore warnings and under-prepare, and then disaster strikes, you make it worse.
If Bush had taken the Hart/Rudman report and Richard Clarke's advice seriously, and actually taken tangible measures in response to the August 6 PDB, then I would have virtually no reason to hold 9/11 against them. But they didn't. They chose to ignore everything. No daily meetings the way Clinton had when building up to the Millennium bomb theat. Nothing.
On the actual day of 9/11, word comes of a hijacking at 8:30 and nothing is done. No jets scrambled. Nobody is on high alert. Then the first plane hits at 8:48. No jets scrambled. Nobody leaves Florida classrooms to get all necessary information on what's happening. We are supposedly in a period of heightened state of alert (the system was blinking red) a hijacking takes place and nobody reacts? The WTC gets hit by a plane and nobody reacts?
Once again, as a leader, you should immediately prepare for the worst. If you scramble jets and get the military on the scene and it turns out it was just some crazy cook in a tiny single-engine plane who wanted to die in spectacular fashion and not even a single WTC window was broken, then you can breathe a sigh of relief. Maybe you spend a little money on jet fuel, but no harm done. And you also get a very realistic training exercise on how to handle potential threats. You can study the day's events and guage reaction time and where breakdowns in communication took place so that you can perform better the next time. If these measures had been taken immediately on 9/11, maybe the second tower could have been spared. Or maybe the Pentagon. Or maybe not -- but at least there would be reassurance that the government did everything it could.
Now look at this weekend. Katrina was obviously a looming threat for pretty much an entire week. The threat kept materializing and kept getting worse as the week went on, peaking on Sunday evening when the storm reached a Category 5 with New Orleans dead in its sights. I went to bed fearing that new Orleans might be completely obliterated on Monday morning.
Once again, responsible leadership should spend the time building up to the hurricane making landfall PREPARING for the worst, and increasing their preparations as the threat got larger. That means available national guard or military activated, that means emergency plans to evacuate people are instituted, that means relief ships on call in Texas or Florida where they can get there within hours of the Hurricane passing through with supplies or to transport people to safety. Berni McCoy had an excellent post with greater detail which is a must read...
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x4517394Now, if the storm weakens and the damage is minimal, everyone can breathe a sigh of relief -- and again, you could evaluate what was done and maybe create task forces to study areas need improving for the next big storm threat. I would much rather see emergency measures taken that turn out to be unnecessary, then doing nothing and then scrambling after the fact. You don't wait and see what happens and THEN make efforts to act on behalf of your citizens. You should prepare for the worst and hope it's not needed.
If the Millennium bombing occurred at LAX, it would have been tragic, but I would have been reassured to know that Clinton was meeting with his staff daily to deal with the threat and that all important people were on a heightened state of alert. You can do everything in your power, and bad things can still happen.
With this administration, though, they don't do a damn thing until well after the fact. And they are always, always too late. They are always reading children's books or hiding in Nebraska or strumming a guitar or something other than taking care of their citizens. If this administration did everything they could to prepare for Katrina (including ending vacation) and there were still a few hundred people killed, you couldn't criticize them. If they had met every day after the August 6 APB and 9/11 still happened, you could at least be reassured that the effort was there to prevent it. If they had prepared for a difficult task in securing Iraq, instead of going on the "flowers and candy" model, maybe thousands of people would still be alive and we'd still have some respect around the world.
Some things are out of your control. This administration, though, consistently screws up the things that it CAN control. And that's why it keeps failing the American people.
(Note: I posted this on GD, but it fell off the page so fast (and it took so long to type), so I thought I'd put it here).
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