Bush and Levee Breaching: Anticipation and Alibis

Shortly after the Katrina disaster, President Bush, offering an alibi for his rotten performance, said "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."

Then this week the AP offered a videotape of a conference, with Bush present by telephone, in which the risk that water would come over the levees was specifically discussed as a likely result of the storm, with "the greatest potential for large loss of life." FEMA director Michael Brown said flatly "This is the Big One." That sparked much outrage among the "Bush lied, people died" crowd.

But the armies of Red Blogistan rushed to the rescue. Patterico Pontificated that the discussion was about the levees' being "topped," not "breached." Mickey Kaus got in a good rant about the "despised, self-parodying MSM," and compared the AP's partial retraction to the behavior of "an indicted pol" because it came late on a Friday. (Oddly, Mickey never has an ill word for the Fox/Murdoch/Washington Times/Drudge right-wing media.) The rest of the usual suspects piled on as usual.

It's true, as the AP has now acknowledged, that the President wasn't literally warned about levee-breaching, as opposed to levee-topping, at the conference depicted in the AP videotape. And it's fair to criticize the AP, and others who based their reports on that videotape, for eliding the difference.

On the other hand, it also turns out that Michael Brown had specifically mentioned the risk of levee-breaching to Bush in briefings before the one on the videotape, and that several official reports about storm risks to New Orleans also considered levee-breaching as one of them. So Bush was at best stretching the language when he said that "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees," unless (like Tom Maguire) you think "anticipate in that context means "consider more likely than not" rather than "consider among the possibilities."

But all of that is really beside the point. Bush's job wasn't to guess whether the levees might break. Bush's job was to make sure that plans were in place to deal with the aftermath if the levees broke. He signally failed at that task, and his "anticipated" comment, whether you accept the quibble or not, is an astonishingly weak alibi for that failure.

Imagine how a real Chief Executive, as opposed to the papier-mâché version we got stuck with, would have responded to Max Mayfield's briefing.