Bush's bad call

EDITED to add: I found a newspaper article via Kris that says that underfunding the levees was not the direct cause of this catastrophe.

"I don't see that the level of funding was really a contributing factor in this case," said Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, chief of engineers for the corps. "Had this project been fully complete, it is my opinion that based on the intensity of this storm that the flooding of the business district and the French Quarter would have still taken place."

So who's right? The local officials or the Army Corps of Engineers? More investigation is needed.

Nelle is suggesting in the comments of this post the President shouldn't be attacked for his actions during this crisis. I'll just agree to disagree with her on that one. But let's look at a decision the President made which has made this catastrophe 100 times worse than it should have been.

This article explains it all. Basically, they needed money from the government to make sure the levees were strong enough. From the article:

In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness.

On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

and

The 2004 hurricane season was the worst in decades. In spite of that, the federal government came back this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history.

and

Local officials are now saying, the article reported, that had Washington heeded their warnings about the dire need for hurricane protection, including building up levees and repairing barrier islands, "the damage might not have been nearly as bad as it turned out to be."

President Bush made a decision and it was the wrong one. The cost: hundreds if not thousands of lives, New Orleans, and many other smaller communities.

EDITED TO ADD: I just watched an interview with President Bush where he said, "No one expected the levees to break." That's just not true, President. Lots of people expected it - that why they asked for the money to fix them.