Good article, 7 pages, What went wrong in New Orleans

JC

EOG Veteran
This is a good comprehensive article.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9179587/

"......What went wrong? Just about everything. How the system failed is a tangled story, but the basic narrative is becoming clearer: hesitancy, bureaucratic rivalries, failures of leadership from city hall to the White House and epically bad luck combined to create a morass. In the early aftermath, fingers pointed in all directions. The president was to blame; no, the looters. No, the bureaucrats. No, the local politicians. It was FEMA's fault?unless it was the Department of Homeland Security's. Or the Pentagon's. Certainly the government failed, and the catastrophe exposed, for all the world to see, raw racial divisions.

Bush's many critics will say that the president was disengaged, on vacation, distracted by Iraq and insensitive to the needs of poor black people. The White House blames the magnitude of the storm itself, patchy information on the ground and a confused chain of command, according to a senior Bush aide who requests anonymity in order to speak freely about internal administration discussions. The truth probably lies somewhere in between. Bush is fighting a war, and he is sometimes slow to react, and he may have been lulled by early reports that New Orleans had been spared the worst of the storm. These are all legitimate excuses. Still, we expect more from a president......."
 
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