In My Time - Dick Cheney [228]
Our next stop was the U.S.S. Iwo Jima for a briefing from Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, who would soon be in charge of all Katrina relief efforts. He was rightly proud of the performance of the Coast Guard. They were rescuing people stranded in trees, in boats, and on roofs. In the end they would save more than thirty thousand lives.
We flew by helicopter to a levee overlooking New Orleans’s Ninth Ward, where we saw complete devastation. As far as the eye could see, fetid water covered everything, except the tops of houses. We met with Lieutenant General Russ Honoré, a native of Louisiana. The commander of Joint Task Force Katrina, Honoré combined authority and ability with a true compassion for what his fellow Louisianans were going through. And he knew how to get things done. He drove Lynne and me through the center of New Orleans in his Humvee to a site where the Coast Guard was loading huge sandbags—the size of sofas—and transporting them by helicopter in an effort to plug the breaches in the levees.
We in the Bush administration took a severe pounding for our response to Hurricane Katrina, and no doubt we could have done things better at all levels. President Bush has written that he should have sent in U.S. troops earlier, which may be true, but which to my mind lets state authorities off the hook too easily. To this day I’m not sure why Governor Blanco refused to request a federalized response to Katrina. I did think she made a wise decision when she determined in 2007 not to run for a second term as Louisiana’s governor.
It is also important to recognize that many people—Mike Chertoff, Thad Allen, and Russ Honoré among them—did tremendous work in the aftermath of one of the worst natural disasters ever to hit the United States. And among those whose efforts ought to be recognized is President George Bush. In the days, weeks, and months after Katrina, he personally dedicated hundreds of hours not only to ensuring an effective federal response, but to reaching out to people who needed to know that their government cared about them.
AS 2005 DREW TO a close, the American military and our partners in the multinational coalition had accomplished a great deal. We had removed one of the world’s worst dictators. We had captured Saddam. We had handed responsibility for Iraq back to the Iraqis, and over the next twelve months they would hold three national elections, produce a constitution, and elect a parliament and prime minister. Our forces had captured and killed many of the leaders of the insurgency and provided security for the Iraqi people when they cast their votes and began to build a democracy.
In our prewar planning for the postwar period, we had anticipated a number of dangerous contingencies that failed to materialize. Saddam did not use weapons of mass destruction. The Republican Guard did not make a stand at Baghdad and force our troops into a siege or house-by-house fighting. Saddam was not able to set his oil fields ablaze or launch missiles into Israel.
There were also some things we failed to anticipate. Based on intelligence reports, we believed we would be able to rely on the Iraqi police to keep the peace and provide security. That turned out not to be true. The Iraqi police were among the least trusted, most infiltrated institutions in Iraqi society. We also thought that once we removed the top Baathist leaders from Saddam