Newsweek digs into Who Lost Louisiana and hits on the problem, that's equally applicable to Iraq:
Most presidents keep a devil's advocate around. Lyndon Johnson had George Ball on Vietnam; President Ronald Reagan and Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, grudgingly listened to the arguments of Budget Director Richard Darman, who told them what they didn't wish to hear: that they would have to raise taxes. When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was not up to the job and that the military, the only institution with the resources to cope, couldn't act without a declaration from the president overriding all other authority...
AMERICAblog sums up Newsweek into nice bullet points.
I remember, way back before the original 9/11, right after Bush rammed the tax cuts through. I asked: "what is he going to DO the next 3 1/2 years? He's done the one thing he wanted to do, cut taxes for rich people." Well, it turned out he also wanted to play global chess world conqueror too, just like Daddy. But clearly domestic nuts and bolts, boring stuff like preparedness, isn't worth the bother. And several thousand people have paid with their lives.
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