Incompetence of the Bush Presidency

An article in the Book Review section of the Sunday NYTimes lists the failures of the Bush administration with respect to the "War on Terror." Briefly, Bush did not:

1. Pay attention to intelligence warnings before 9/11.
2. Hunt Osama bin Laden until he was caught.
3. Think twice before invading Iraq and review his father's book.
4. Send enough troops to establish security.
5. Recognize the growing insurgency until it was too big to crush,
6. Begin building an Iraqi Army and police services in a timely manner.
7. Foresee that a war in Iraq would draw jihadists from every corner of the Islamic world.
8. Ever come clean on his true objective for invading Iraq.

The mess Bush and his cronies have created is so profound that no one, least of all Bush, has been able to suggest a way of achieving any kind of success.

On the homeland security front in Bush's "War on Terror" his incompetence has shown itself to be just as thorough. An editorial in today's WP, starts as follows:

IN THE WAKE of the catastrophic performance of the Federal Emergency Management Agency during Hurricane Katrina, it was hard not to heap opprobrium on the head of Michael D. Brown, the FEMA boss who sent joking e-mails to an aide in the middle of the storm ("Can I quit now? Can I go home?") as well as his boss, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who seemed to know less about the plight of New Orleans than the television reporters asking him questions about it. But as Post reporters Susan B. Glasser and Michael Grunwald showed in their two-part series last week ["Prelude to Disaster," Dec. 22-23], the failures of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security predate Hurricane Katrina by several years. Although both Mr. Chertoff and Mr. Brown made mistakes during the storm, far more fingers should have been pointed at the haphazard, irrational and unabashedly political process that led to the creation of DHS, as well as the inept leadership of the department's first boss, Tom Ridge.

The last sentence of the editorial is:

Will incompetence be remembered as the salient characteristic of the Bush presidency?