Bush Takes Responsibility for Failures in Storm Response

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 13 - President Bush, who is scheduled to make his first address to the nation about the Hurricane Katrina disaster on Thursday, said today that he accepted responsibility for the extent to which the federal government fell short of its share in relief efforts.

I predict that before the week is through Scott McClellan will contradict the President. This admitting failure thing won't last.

David Brooks shares his strategy on Iraq:

Krepinevich's proposal is hardly new. He's merely describing a classic counterinsurgency strategy, which was used, among other places, in Malaya by the British in the 1950's. The same approach was pushed by Tom Donnelly and Gary Schmitt in a Washington Post essay back on Oct. 26, 2003; by Kenneth Pollack in Senate testimony this July 18; and by dozens of midlevel Army and Marine Corps officers in Iraq.

Krepinevich calls the approach the oil-spot strategy. The core insight is that you can't win a war like this by going off on search and destroy missions trying to kill insurgents. There are always more enemy fighters waiting. You end up going back to the same towns again and again, because the insurgents just pop up after you've left and kill anybody who helped you. You alienate civilians, who are the key to success, with your heavy-handed raids.

Instead of trying to kill insurgents, Krepinevich argues, it's more important to protect civilians. You set up safe havens where you can establish good security. Because you don't have enough manpower to do this everywhere at once, you select a few key cities and take control. Then you slowly expand the size of your safe havens, like an oil spot spreading across the pavement.

Two and a half years into this and now we're supposed to decide what our strategy is? Sheesh. Oh, and the strategy calls for many more soldiers. Where are they supposed to come from? We're out of reservists and regular military recruiting is down. This new strategy also requires a President who can admit mistakes. Short of an impeachment, that's not going to happen for another three and a half years.

Here's a hint: Britain didn't establish permanent bases in Malaysia. They made it clear they were on the way out. That's what this war is really about -- whether or not the U.S. has permanent bases in Iraq. That's why Bush always refuses to say under what conditions American soldiers can leave Iraq.

Though all recent contributions have been by Ed, this is not a single-person blog.

Shorter Gregg Easterbrook:

• I didn't understand the part in Guns, germs, and Steel where Jared Diamond explains how China's gentle topography and extensive navigable river systems made it easy to administer as a very large centralized state at a comparatively early date in history.


• We can safely dismiss Diamond's concerns about our present society's use of limited resources, because if things do get tight, we can just use moon-fuel to move into our brand-new moon-cities.

Public Speaking tips #001: Death Income

This sentence contains my final use of the word "inheritance." The problem with the old term is that it might lead one to think that death income is a good thing, what with the old word's cloying connotations of devotion to kith and kin, but as this questionable perspective is only truly available to people who are already dead, it seems wrong to me to use the term in otherwise reasonable fiscal argument.

In the debate over death income, there are a couple of points to keep in mind about proper usage of the terminology.

1. Most importantly, death income, like other no-work income, is not "earned," it is collected. Don't use the term "unearned"-- it's unweildy, it has the incorrect "earned" in it, and it's already taken (my accountant friend tells me it means something difficult in the tax code).

2. Keep in mind that as bad as death income sounds to people like you and me, who live proper lives supporting ourselves with normal (that is, work) income, death income is even more objectionable when it is high or very high death income. Apply extra adjectives as appropriate.

So, to review:

Old way: "I think people recieving in-------ces should have them taxed as income, though maybe it could be amortized over several years, or..." (etc etc, blah blah, endless cringing, waffling, and appeasement).

New way: "I think people collecting high death income should be taxed at least as much as workers earning normal income.

No, my friend. George W. Bush was not too stingy in his response to the tsunami.

More accurately, he wasn't any stingier than you were. No, I don't mean to imply that world leaders ought to be held to the same standards as normal people, and I'm not saying you were a cheapskate, either. What I'm saying is that you don't understand how the President Bush responded to the tragedy.

One important difference between your response and Mr. Bush's is that he was on vacation. Now, I realize the guy takes an awful lot of time off, and that it might be nice if he'd left the brush harvest to The Help just this once, and returned to the office early to shake his head and mumble dejected amazedments in the kitchenette along with the rest of us, but that's just not how this man works. He takes his vacation seriously, and vacation, my friend, means getting away from all the headaches you have to deal with at the office.

If your job description is "be the President," then it's really, really hard to get away from it all. In fact, it's impossible, so the poor guy has to set aside an hour or two out of each and every vacation day to check in with the office and make sure everything's OK. The rest of the day, however, is for strictly non-work vacation-type stuff, and if you're in the presidenting industry, then "non-work" means no TV, no newspapers, no unexpected phone calls from the office allowed, and no internet, not even blog-reading.

Other men in the trade might be a little loose about the formal requirements of presidential vacationing, but not George W. Bush. He's a man of discipline, a man who sticks to a strict schedule, a man who doesn't just wander off in the middle of a brush harvest without finishing the job. This is a man who takes his vacationing every bit as seriously as he takes his work, because he loves his family and his land and he cherishes his time with them. Probably more than you do.

So it was that on December 26th, George W. Bush, during his daily check-in with the office, heard about the tsunami, or "big wave." Now, the President's schedule is, for good reason, a matter of national security, so I don't personally know what time of day it was when he heard the news. But I'm guessing it was in the early afternoon, after a leisurely morning, because a meeting in the neighborhood of one-o'clock would provide the perfect catalyst for a mid-afternoon nap, after which one might awake refreshed and ready for the remaining hours of daylight, full of brush harvesting, rugged mountain bicycling, or other manly pursuits (evenings, of course, must cleave to the American Traditional, filled agreeably with Family Time and Televised Sporting Events).

It is possible, I suppose, that having consumed too much in the way of improbable movies or television fantasies about imaginary Presidents, you may have very different notions of what a presidential vacation ought to look like, but you must rid yourself of such nonsensical rubbish. Actors playing presidents may very well have nameless well-dressed persons wearing ear-pieces rushing in willy-nilly to brief the imaginary president on diseased oats crops in the Mongo-Bongo Delta, but real Presidents do not have to put up with this crap. In fact, the only people I can think of whose jobs really do involve constant interruptions from panic-stricken aides equipped with earpieces are... directors of movies and television programs.

No, President Bush doesn't let his staff get in the way of Core Values like Family and God and Paid Executive Vacation. If you'd just take a moment to imagine the President and First Lady sitting together on the day after Christmas, holding hands and beaming at the twins, both girls completely absorbed with brushing and petting and otherwise fussing over their brand-new and elaborately beribboned twin thoroughbred ponies, you'd realize that it would take a lesser man, a man without the full measure of love for his wife and children, to allow interruption of this happy scene by a scowling, jittery, and possibly sweating person bearing ill tidings from some hopeless corner of the world where people don't even have proper toilets.

Anyway, when Mr. Bush called the office on the 26th, they told him that there had been a tsunami, and that... 3,000 people were dead. My memory isn't what it used to be, but that's about where I remember the death toll standing in the early afternoon of the 26th. Maybe it was 5,000, I don't know. I'm pretty sure it didn't hit 10,000 until much later in the evening.

So Mr. Bush, being a fairly warm-hearted (if simple) fellow, was saddened by the tragedy, and wished to express his sorrow, so he told the office to go get a condolence card and have everyone sign it, and tuck a check for fifteen million dollars in the envelope, because he really did want to do something to help, and it actually seemed very, very generous at the time, seeing as how it looked like the big wave hadn't killed nearly as many people as it might have.

And he went out and worked on the brush harvest and had a nice quiet evening watching some DVDs with the family, and went to bed feeling like he'd done a very good deed. I'm pretty sure you didn't feel especially compelled to donate blood or send cookies that evening, either, even if you're in the dubious habit of checking the news right before bed.

Well, things didn't get better overnight.

Bush, to his credit, responded to the rising death toll with another check. I'll allow it looks like the new amount, which, as you may have heard, was thirty-five million dollars, wasn't directly proportional to the increase in reported casualties, which I dimly recall as being in the neighborhood of 30,000 dead by early afternoon of the 27th, but I can think of quite a few reasonable explanations for the apparent shortfall in funding.

Maybe the folks at the office figured they'd been really generous with the first check, so the second one didn't have to be as impressive. Maybe nobody in the conference call had looked at CNN or the internet in the past few hours. Maybe Mr. Bush had a quick peek at the morning paper, with the previous evening's death toll of 10,000 in it, and started right in at the meeting with what he'd read in the papers, and how he'd like to send another check, and then moved on to the next agenda item without discussing casualty figures. Or maybe nobody wanted to correct him, or question the magnitude of his generous offer, or maybe the most recent sad statistics just never got mentioned. You know how it is. It's crazy how meetings can go zipping right past you, and you never get a chance to talk about the key findings in the report you spent the whole morning working on. Or perhaps Mr. Bush had something particularly exciting planned that afternoon, maybe an experimental plot of extra-fancy high-grade brush had just reached the peak of ripeness, and the daily call to the office was moved to early morning, instead of early afternoon, and the body-count wasn't as far along, and everyone on the call was a little groggy and under-caffeinated, anyway.

Whatever the case, I'm absolutely certain that Mr. Bush had no reason on that second day to feel like he was being anything but an upright world citizen and a true friend to the poor people on the coasts of the far-off Indian Ocean. And what about you? If I remember it right, it was around the time Mr. Bush was making this second (and possibly misinformed) pledge that, we, the most righteous bloggers of blogland, our hearts swelling with sadness, were taking a long look at their Christmas presents, reaching for our wallets and keyboards, and pledging the entirety of our... Amazon Associates Program earnings.

Um, yes. That does seem somewhat crass, in hindsight.

The next day, President Bush added a zero to his official relief donation, as did we, the most righteous bloggers of blogland. The difference is that while he went from thirty-five million to three hundred fifty million, we went from two dollars and twenty-three cents to $22.50 (didn't you read the fine print? $2.50 handling charge to be applied to all online credit-card payments).

You may have gathered from my tone that I am not a whole-hearted supporter of Mr. Bush. Nonetheless, I think that the amounts of American taxpayers' money he has progressively pledged to help the victims of this disaster have been timely, compassionate, and appropriate (if not outstandingly generous) in light of a) Mr. Bush's vacation schedule, b) the fact that the death toll grew steadily, hour upon hour for three days, and shocked and horrified you and me and everyone else with its grim, ponderous denouement, and c) the fact that even though modern technology may allow you the somewhat grandiose delusion of perfect, as-it-happens access to every event everywhere in the world, it still takes hours or even days for the news to reach the audience— and that includes you, the blog audience.

And just in case you're still wondering, yes, the people who have been angrily shouting and typing about how Mr. Bush is such a miserly brown-person-hating monster-man are, in fact, using a terrible tragedy to score cheap political points, and ought to be ashamed of themselves.

You can criticize President Bush for a great many things, some of which touch peripherally on the issue of his specific response to this specific disaster. I, myself, for example, am not yet through with my critique of the curious relationship Mr. Bush has with brush, and I will be revisiting the topic, I'm afraid, at some length. You can criticize Mr. Bush for his vacationing schedule, yes. You can certainly criticize his funding, or lack thereof, for various efforts to develop, er, developing nations. You can continue to make all of these arguments and then some (And I'm quite certain you will), and what's more, you can make each and every one of them without concluding that Mr. Bush hates dead tsunami babies. I'd prefer it, really.

But if, despite my patient explanations and gentle exhortations, you're still absolutely determined to excoriate Mr. Bush for being too slow in offerring reasonable sums of money to the stricken, then I do hope you're prepared to criticize the survivors for being too damned slow in counting the corpses.