McNamara, defense chief during Vietnam War, dies

[K. A. Pital]

The problem was that the danger existed that the world could blunder into a nuclear war by a series of mis-steps and mis-conceptions that would create momentum that led to a nuclear strike

That is right. And the more delusional a nation's leaders would be in regards to the possibility of "winning" such a war, the more prone would they be to start one. If Hitler wasn't so delusional as to believe the Aryan ubermensch, would easily tromp the enemies of Germany, he wouldn't start a war most understood is not to be won.

The more is there a belief that you could win something (especially win it relatively easily), the more capacity for blunder.

Iraq is a prime example. Easy victory - 5 years on a massive blunder. Overconfidence + lies. You don't think that blostering the confidence of the US chief of staffs regarding the preparedness of theUS for nuclear war would not have adverse effects?

[MKSheppard]

You don't think that blostering the confidence of the US chief of staffs regarding the preparedness of theUS for nuclear war would not have adverse effects?

Ah, the old "it will work TOO well" canard; trotted out when challenging National Aerospace Defense's technical merits no longer works.

[K. A. Pital]

That's not the question I asked, Shep. I asked whether more confidence in one's defences would not lead to adverse effects like blundering into a nuclear war. It's not an issue of something working too well. It might work as shit. The important part is the perception.

I have not seen enough evidence that giving US political and military leadership more confidence in themselves is a tactic that leads to less wars. Or less debacles for that matter. In fact I'm pretty confident that without a good chunk of this confidence neither Vietnam nor Iraq would have happened in the first place. Give them more confidence, and you know, the "Cold War" (TM) might not have ended all that well.

[Starglider]

That's not the question I asked, Shep. I asked whether more confidence in one's defences would not lead to adverse effects like blundering into a nuclear war.

Your position is transparently hypocritical and self-serving, given the massive Soviet investment in civil defense and significantly greater ABM deployment than the US. I expect that next you'll say that the US should have no second-strike capability, because that allowed them to invade Vietnam without being deterred by the risk of a USSR counterforce first strike on the US. Of course the USSR deserved robust second strike, because the USSR is inherently ethical...

[The Yosemite Bear]

After the M16 and my sister and stepfather's health problems I used to say I would celebrate his demise, Instead I cried, I don't know if that makes me a better human being then I thought I was. I heard his own family sufffered from the efects of Agent Orange, the lowest bidder/ rar lolbertaians invisible hand of the free market got us ammunition that fouled barrels, and not the requested number of cleaning kits.

[K. A. Pital]

Your position is transparently hypocritical

Save this holier-than-thou attitude for someone without a brain. "Self-serving" my ass. It's not my nation which held gigatons of nukes pointed at the nation that barely had a functioning nuclear deterrent for 20 something years. It's not my nation which lied it's fucking ass out about some sort of "missile gap" existing with the USA - there was a huge supremacy that we had to counter.

We were under constant threat of obliteration. The USA was under fucking nothing. It was a fucking island night unreachable for the USSR until it had thousands of ICBMs built up by the 1970. And even then you have the fucking gall to castigate our nation for ... what, following the ABM treaty? Creating civil defence in the face of an enemy who had unchallenged nuclear supremacy for 20 years?

Think before you speak. That makes you smarter.

I expect that next you'll say that the US should have no second-strike capability

Second-strike capability? Did I speak anything about it? No. Apparently, however, you are perfectly fine with denying a second strike capability to Russia/USSR and China. Because that's what it's all about.

Of course the USSR deserved robust second strike, because the USSR is inherently ethical...

No, it deserved a second strike because there are people in this very thread who casually joke about making my nation an irradiated ruin during the Cuban Missile Crisis as a "superior" outcome to reality. Fuck you Starglider.

[Simon_Jester]

It's not my nation which held gigatons of nukes pointed at the nation that barely had a functioning nuclear deterrent for 20 something years. It's not my nation which lied it's fucking ass out about some sort of "missile gap" existing with the USA - there was a huge supremacy that we had to counter.

We were under constant threat of obliteration. The USA was under fucking nothing. It was a fucking island night unreachable for the USSR until it had thousands of ICBMs built up by the 1970. And even then you have the fucking gall to castigate our nation for ... what, following the ABM treaty? Creating civil defence in the face of an enemy who had unchallenged nuclear supremacy for 20 years?

In our defense, I will say only that:

1)We really believed our own screwed up ideas about Soviet capabilities and intentions (in short, that they were a mirror image of the same stuff you describe), that this was not simply a lie made with malice aforethought, and
2)That we didn't (by and large, crazies excepted) think we should shoot first.
________

In terms of who wins yes, but (virtually) any timeline in which a strategic nuclear exchange and the consequent millions of innocent deaths occurs is worse than the actual timeline, where we got through the second half of the 20th century with just a relatively small amount of conventional warfare. So by 'close run thing', I mean that the world collectively avoided a nuclear exchange by quite a slim margin, and even small changes would have a nontrivial chance of reversing that.

Good point.

[Ziggy Stardust]

How would FEMA's response have differed under a different administrator?

It would have been effective. Brown was incompetent, and Rumsfeld was sadistic. You do realize this isn't just conjecture, right? Several investigations into the Katrina response have shown that it was mismanaged on many levels.

However, I think you overestimate the ability of even the FEMA head to substantially prepare for a storm the magnitude and impact of Katrina, and underestimate the amount of time needed to get things rolling when it comes to disaster-response.

Nope. FEMA has a system in place for responding to disasters of this sort. Not only are FEMA personnel trained in fast response, but many local officials in New Orleans (and other parts of the country) are pre-briefed with details so they can coordinate with FEMA. Brown was, quite simply, an idiot, and Rumsfeld deliberately denied resources to the response out of spite.

This is symptomatic of a wider tendency which relates back to McNamara: assigning individual personalities buckets of blame for situations which are best described as complex systems of systems.

Have you been living under a rock for the past couple of years? It's been well covered in the media how both Brown and Rumsfeld INTENTIONALLY responded slower than FEMA protocol called for. This isn't a case of "wrong place, wrong time" or "shooting the messenger" as you seem to think; it was a mixture of incompetence and intentional neglect.

[Uraniun235]

1)We really believed our own screwed up ideas about Soviet capabilities and intentions (in short, that they were a mirror image of the same stuff you describe), that this was not simply a lie made with malice aforethought, and

Pretty sure Kennedy was deliberately lying when he hammered the "missile gap" talking point during his presidential campaign.

[Starglider]

It's not my nation which lied it's fucking ass out about some sort of "missile gap" existing with the USA - there was a huge supremacy that we had to counter.

You reaped what you sowed. The foreign policy of the USSR was based on intimidation; fear of its massive military machine. Stalin and Khrushchev were both keen on spectacular, empty demonstrations of military power, like the 100 megaton bomb design that was good for nothing except glassing Berlin out of spite. The US had a few hard-liners saying 'we should nuke the USSR before they get into a position of supremacy', but the stated official policy of the USSR was the destruction of all Western governments, something which didn't relax until the 70s. Such belligerency more than merited the US arms build up.

And even then you have the fucking gall to castigate our nation for ... what, following the ABM treaty?

You claim that the US should not have ABM and you should have. You did not put any time restrictions on that. Widespread deployment of a useful ABM would not have come until the USSR was well into its missile buildup anyway.

Creating civil defence in the face of an enemy who had unchallenged nuclear supremacy for 20 years?

The USSR had massive conventional supremacy throughout the entire cold war (arguably not quite as massive in the 1980s). You could have scaled your army back, removed the the knife from Western Europe's throat and the crushing boot from Eastern Europe's chest, but you refused to. In the mid 20th century US nuclear supremacy was the only check on rampant Soviet ambition and conventional superiority, and it was more than deserved. Don't try and pretend that you were the victims.

[Stuart]

since they don't even bother to help clear the unexploded ordnance they left all over the region).

Not true. Demining and ordnance disposal is funded under NADR of Foreign Operations. Funding for FY10 is US$765.43 million FY09 funding was US$651.5 million while FY08 funding was US$496 million . Allowing for inflation, funding for demining and ordnance disposal has been at this level since the mid-1970s. This is aid money given to other governments to fund mine clearance. U.S. military operations to remove mines and unexploded ordnance are funded from the U.S. defense budget.

[Simon_Jester]

Postscript to what I said above:

One of the reasons the US believed all that crazy stuff about the Soviets having far more nuclear firepower than they really did and being far more willing to use it than they really were is that the USSR pursued a deliberate program of disinformation and (as Starglider says) intimidation. They were not open and up-front about their internal politics, their intentions, or their capabilities, even when we make allowances for specific details that any military will want to keep secret.

The US was operating in an information vacuum, with little real knowledge to go on except for transparently false propaganda broadcasts and whatever minimal data we could get from spy planes and (later on) satellite recon. In the absence of knowledge, people had to guess, and the odds of anyone guessing right about the politics and resources of the USSR were very poor. Therefore, there were really only two schools of thought about the Soviets in the West. One school vastly underestimated their military power and aggressiveness, and one vastly overestimated both.

Stalin effectively discredited the first school in the eyes of most Americans during the late 1940s and early 1950s, allowing the second school to dominate the field by default. And it was this school that got hysterical about the "missile gap" and wound up pointing several gigatons of nuclear warheads down the Russians' throats... because they honestly believed that nothing less would deter the Russians from trying to conquer the world in the near future.

Whether that was true or not, it has to be said that the Soviets' own actions did a lot to convince Americans to believe it.

[Patrick Degan]

George W. Bush put a crony who's only prior experience was managing Saudi Arabian whorse races in charge of FEMA.

How would FEMA's response have differed under a different administrator? I'm not asking Deegan, I'm asking you, but if he wants to come forward and put up information, then please - by all means.

Clearly, placing Brown in a position with that magnitude of responsibility was a mistake. However, I think you overestimate the ability of even the FEMA head to substantially prepare for a storm the magnitude and impact of Katrina, and underestimate the amount of time needed to get things rolling when it comes to disaster-response.

First: FEMA was stripped of its status as an independent agency and placed under DHS, which put a whole level of bureaucracy upon its operations which did not exist prior to Georgie the Stupider taking office.

Second: FEMA was turned into a haven of cronyism, with management positions being determined by who gave to the Bush campaign fund, to which Michael Brown was a substantial contributor. Crisis and disaster management professionals were steadily sidelined, neutralised, or eased out.

Third: the Hurricane Pam exercise outlined precisely the magnitude of the disaster that would occur with a direct hurricane strike on New Orleans and the sort of timeframes that would be available. The data were there but ignored by the Bush maladministration —which also gleefully cut funding for the levee upgrade projects authorised under Clinton until those budgets were practically nonexistent.

Fourth: EVEN AFTER THE DISASTER STRUCK, and it was more than obvious that New Orleans was in distress, the agency's response was nothing less than scandalous for its slowness and inefficiency —with Brown himself infamously being more concerned with getting his reserved table in a Baton Rouge restaurant than DOING HIS FUCKING JOB.

[MKSheppard]

First: FEMA was stripped of its status as an independent agency and placed under DHS, which put a whole level of bureaucracy upon its operations which did not exist prior to Georgie the Stupider taking office.

and

Second: FEMA was turned into a haven of cronyism, with management positions being determined by who gave to the Bush campaign fund, to which Michael Brown was a substantial contributor. Crisis and disaster management professionals were steadily sidelined, neutralised, or eased out.

Civil Defense in the US has never been a serious concern, unlike in other countries; it's always been a haven of cronyism and has been chronically starved; and subject to many of these bureaucratic realignments -- following the organizational history of CD has always been a nightmare.

The data were there but ignored by the Bush maladministration —which also gleefully cut funding for the levee upgrade projects authorised under Clinton until those budgets were practically nonexistent.

You know IF the planned Levee Upgrade Programs had been kept on time, and on schedule -- you know, the upgrades programmed in the 1960s to be done relatively shortly, yet by 2000 or therabouts, they weren't scheduled to finish until about 2020 or so; things would have been a lot less worse.

[Patrick Degan]

First: FEMA was stripped of its status as an independent agency and placed under DHS, which put a whole level of bureaucracy upon its operations which did not exist prior to Georgie the Stupider taking office.

and

Second: FEMA was turned into a haven of cronyism, with management positions being determined by who gave to the Bush campaign fund, to which Michael Brown was a substantial contributor. Crisis and disaster management professionals were steadily sidelined, neutralised, or eased out.

Civil Defense in the US has never been a serious concern, unlike in other countries; it's always been a haven of cronyism and has been chronically starved; and subject to many of these bureaucratic realignments -- following the organizational history of CD has always been a nightmare.

That may be true. But even with that factor in consideration, the FEMA lack-of-response to the disaster in New Orleans for six days was nothing less than criminal incompetence and the agency had a better track record before Georgie the Stupider came into office.

The data were there but ignored by the Bush maladministration —which also gleefully cut funding for the levee upgrade projects authorised under Clinton until those budgets were practically nonexistent.

You know IF the planned Levee Upgrade Programs had been kept on time, and on schedule -- you know, the upgrades programmed in the 1960s to be done relatively shortly, yet by 2000 or therabouts, they weren't scheduled to finish until about 2020 or so; things would have been a lot less worse.

True enough. But cutting back on the protection project which was underway was still inexcusable.

[erik_t]

It's always been my point of view that W et al bear very little responsibility for anything that happened up until the hurricane; it's not as though he forced NOLA below sea level through sheer force of will. Other than maybe additional supply prepositioning immediately prior to landfall, or tweaking the implementation of contraflow... there's not a whole lot that could have been done.

The thing Bush should never live down is the godawful management of the situation in the week immediately following landfall.

Cue about twelve paragraphs from Degan on this issue.

[Patrick Degan]

It's always been my point of view that W et al bear very little responsibility for anything that happened up until the hurricane; it's not as though he forced NOLA below sea level through sheer force of will. Other than maybe additional supply prepositioning immediately prior to landfall, or tweaking the implementation of contraflow... there's not a whole lot that could have been done.

The thing Bush should never live down is the godawful management of the situation in the week immediately following landfall.

Cue about twelve paragraphs from Degan on this issue.

It doesn't require twelve paragraphs to point out the very obvious Red Herring in your statement: the location of New Orleans has fuck-all to do with how Bush gutted FEMA, gutted levee protection, and how the management of the agency was left in the hands of a horse-whisperer whose only qualification for his job was the big fat campaign cheque he cut for Georgie the Stupider back in 2000.

[Axis Kast]

First: FEMA was stripped of its status as an independent agency and placed under DHS, which put a whole level of bureaucracy upon its operations which did not exist prior to Georgie the Stupider taking office.

Second: FEMA was turned into a haven of cronyism, with management positions being determined by who gave to the Bush campaign fund, to which Michael Brown was a substantial contributor. Crisis and disaster management professionals were steadily sidelined, neutralised, or eased out.

Third: the Hurricane Pam exercise outlined precisely the magnitude of the disaster that would occur with a direct hurricane strike on New Orleans and the sort of timeframes that would be available. The data were there but ignored by the Bush maladministration —which also gleefully cut funding for the levee upgrade projects authorised under Clinton until those budgets were practically nonexistent.

Fourth: EVEN AFTER THE DISASTER STRUCK, and it was more than obvious that New Orleans was in distress, the agency's response was nothing less than scandalous for its slowness and inefficiency —with Brown himself infamously being more concerned with getting his reserved table in a Baton Rouge restaurant than DOING HIS FUCKING JOB.

The question was how, and whether, many of these problems have been substantially corrected since the Bush administration.

FEMA remains under the vast umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security, for example.

Like McNamara, the Bush administration is blamed for Katrina principally because, "The buck stops here." We aren't engaging with Katrina as a wicked problem in a complicated political setting defined by crisis management rather than rational selection of issues based on a valid sense of what our priorities are.

McNamara apparently did express reservations about the Vietnam War. So, too, did LeMay. They were then told, "Go shine this turd."

Whatsmore, the domestic political constituency wasn't frequently railing about the "unwinnability" of the Iraq War, in the same way that the Europeans weren't telling us, "You're wrong about Saddam's actual, factual possession of WMD," or, "We don't believe Iran has got a nuclear program." The protests were frequently over the morality and utility of the war, and an expression of citizens' opinion about their domestic leaders. The Europeans opposed action in Iraq because they doubted the utility of really doing anything until - if - trouble reared its ugly head. The Europeans are still out five or ten steps ahead of the United States in pointing the finger at Iran. What does this mean? People should get their facts straight before they come to kick anybody else's shins.

[Axis Kast]

Change that to, "... wasn't frequently railing about the "unwinnability" of the Vietnam War, especially at first..."

[The Yosemite Bear]

Ok, is it soon enough?

Why McNamara wasn't so bad top 5

5. Rumsfield had already replaced him as Worst Sec. Def. EVAH in internet memes.
4. F-111, Apache Program, and A-10 all started as an off shoot of the vietnam war
3. Critics gave us good music, that's still being used today.
2. Actually helped improve some things, and admitted where he was wrong
1. Vietnam Vets and Hmong now have a new Holiday July 6th, celebrate with fireworks, discharging firearms into the air, and popping wine bottles.

[K. A. Pital]

Stalin and Khrushchev were both keen on spectacular, empty demonstrations of military power, like the 100 megaton bomb design that was good for nothing except glassing Berlin out of spite.

Maybe we should have glassed a few cities like America did? You know, "out of spite"? Also, what's so "intimidating" in a 100 megaton bomb? It's unusable as a weapon. America on the other hand was keen on non-empty demonstrations of power. Which is more threatening - gigatons of usable nuclear ordnance, or one 100 Mt bomb which you cannot use?

the stated official policy of the USSR was the destruction of all Western governments

Really? Care to provide the relevant quotes from the USSR's constitution or any other law, or even any post-World War II propaganda pamphlet? That looks like bullshit to me - because it is.

You claim that the US should not have ABM and you should have. You did not put any time restrictions on that. Widespread deployment of a useful ABM would not have come until the USSR was well into its missile buildup anyway.

That's a load of bullshit and a strawman. I never claimed that - show me where exactly did I say that the USSR should've had an ABM system capable of negating a US strike, or any ABM system exceeding the treaty limits for that matter? "You should have"? Our ABM system was deployed in accordance with the ABM treaty. As for the US gutting even it's allowed ABM system, I never said they should've gone to such depths.

The USSR had massive conventional supremacy throughout the entire cold war (arguably not quite as massive in the 1980s).

Once again, so what, you hypocrite, strawmanning asshole? That has no relation to the issues you brought up (like ABM and civil defence). In what pertains to things like ABM and civil defence, they were a natural - let me beat that into your head - natural actions of a nation which has been under the threat of nuclear annihilation. Whether you want to admit it or not, retaliatory capabilities are critical to ensuring a balance of forces. The USSR lacked them, and thus invested in civil defence which made sense from a survival viewpoint. The USA for a large part did not have any looming threat of annihilation.

Also, the USSR had no naval supremacy so your bullshit is once again exposed in plain view. In a conventional war, the USSR had no abilities to inflict serious damage on the USA with it's forces. And the USSR airforce and navy were not superior to that of the USA or NATO for that matter.

So the only "conventional superiority" the USSR had was the land army, which is nothing but natural for a nation which has, let me remind you, 1/8th of land area of the Earth.

You could have scaled your army back

Hey fucktard, how about reading a fucking history book? You know, about cutting the military in 1946-1948 down from the 11-million to some 3 million. Later on, the Army was scaled up to 5,3 million by 1953, but by 1958 it was cut down to 3,1 million and it was planned to have it lowered in 1963 to 2,5 million (the CMC messed that up).

But guess what, that was not enough apparently. I guess the only level of Soviet forces you'd be content with and call it "non-threatening" would be zero, right?

removed the the knife from Western Europe's throat and the crushing boot from Eastern Europe's chest, but you refused to.

A lot of self-righteous bullshit from you again. Like I said, read a history book. At the same time as America built up gigatons of nukes, the USSR scaled down it's military more than 50%. At the point when America had so much nuclear ordnance it could basically excise every Soviet megapolis from the face of the earth many times over (and I shouldn't remind you what it would mean, because in such cold climate infrastructure destruction would lead to massive starvation and complete degradation of the population), the USSR was barely making it's first serial nuclear detonations. At the time when the USSR was building it's first, unreliable ICBMs, the USA screamed about a "missile gap" which was a blatant lie.

In the mid 20th century US nuclear supremacy was the only check on rampant Soviet ambition and conventional superiority, and it was more than deserved. Don't try and pretend that you were the victims.

"Victims" of what? Once again, what's your problem?

You said that my position is hypocritical. In what? The USSR had ABM according to the treaty. Civil defence is entirely a matter of a nation's internal politics, and if the USA did a poor fucking job of organizing it, the USSR is not at fault here, sorry.

I said: more confidence for the US military brass would mean more reckless actions would be possible. You disagree? You think the Soviet civil defence system or the Moscow ABM are somehow related to that statement, or making it "hypocritical"? Prove it, and not with that bogus bullshit whine of yours.

You think other nations don't deserve the right to excise USA from the face of the fucking Earth, but the USA deserves, at all times, the right to do so with other nations without fearing retaliation, and should deserve that at all times. You're no different from all the US jingoists who think that a nuclear balance is a bad idea, and unilateral-stike capable nuclear hyperpower is a better idea. You're the hypocrite. Either put up to your ridiculous statements, or shut up.

The US "second strike" capabilities at all times were more than enough to deter anyone from anything even without ABM. Your whine about a very simple, history-proven fact which I noted, more confidence in defences leads to greater blunders, only shows how fucking dumb you really are.

[Axis Kast]

Really? Care to provide the relevant quotes from the USSR's constitution or any other law, or even any post-World War II propaganda pamphlet? That looks like bullshit to me - because it is.

Uh... the grand political theory of Communism presupposes that there are huddled masses, yearning to breath free, who need to be liberated, sometimes in orgiastic violence, and placed under dictatorship, pending achievement of "true" equality.

In practice, the Soviet Union governed its sphere of influence with astonishing brutality, particularly under Joseph Stalin.

[K. A. Pital]

Uh... the grand political theory of Communism

You were dealing with Yugoslavia and China. China was like 10fold the brutality, also. So?

In practice, the Soviet Union governed its sphere of influence with astonishing brutality

The USSR had no ability, at any point during 1945-1960, to exert it's sphere of influence into the USA, or in any way conquer, damage or destroy US cities, industries, population. You are saying you pointed gigatons of nukes at my nation because it treated other nations brutally under Stalin? The USSR had no ability to "destroy the Western governments" and it's foreign policy even during Stalin's times has been changed (including the disbanding of Comintern). The USA invested in the Soviet industrialization in teh 1930s, basically giving the USSR all key industrial technologies. Let me remind you that in the 1930s, the USSRs policy indeed was still in some ways tied to the ideas of Comintern and "world revolution". The post-war USSR had no such goals.

Why didn't you lob some nukes into the Khmer Rouge-controlled Cambodia then? Surely they were far more brutal.

The real issue, and one that you and Starglider would both shun to admit, is that the USA only asessed threats in the Cold War on the basis of a nation being capable to inflict damage on the USA. The USSR was a superpower capable of achieving a nuclear deterrent with your nation.

The fact that the US gleefully invested in the USSR in the 1930s, when it was a weak agrarian nation, and helped it to become an industrial giant at the same time as the USSR's doctrine was to support revolutions and that "communism shall wash away all borders", shows that the US only cared for weakness or strength of a military opponent, not for it's stated goals. The USSR had a far smaller military and far more peaceful official goals in the post-war times, but it was stronger. That the USA could not tolerate.

[Elfdart]

Really? Care to provide the relevant quotes from the USSR's constitution or any other law, or even any post-World War II propaganda pamphlet? That looks like bullshit to me - because it is.

Uh... the grand political theory of Communism presupposes that there are huddled masses, yearning to breath free, who need to be liberated, sometimes in orgiastic violence, and placed under dictatorship, pending achievement of "true" equality.

In practice, the Soviet Union governed its sphere of influence with astonishing brutality, particularly under Joseph Stalin.

Huddled masses? Yearning to breathe free? Are you calling the Statue of Liberty a communist?

[erik_t]

It's always been my point of view that W et al bear very little responsibility for anything that happened up until the hurricane; it's not as though he forced NOLA below sea level through sheer force of will. Other than maybe additional supply prepositioning immediately prior to landfall, or tweaking the implementation of contraflow... there's not a whole lot that could have been done.

The thing Bush should never live down is the godawful management of the situation in the week immediately following landfall.

Cue about twelve paragraphs from Degan on this issue.

It doesn't require twelve paragraphs to point out the very obvious Red Herring in your statement: the location of New Orleans has fuck-all to do with how Bush gutted FEMA, gutted levee protection, and how the management of the agency was left in the hands of a horse-whisperer whose only qualification for his job was the big fat campaign cheque he cut for Georgie the Stupider back in 2000.

Um... do we disagree? I'm honestly confused. I'm just saying, or trying to say, that arguing about levee construction etc. ignores the worst-by-far failure of Bush's FEMA - the aftermath of the hurricane.