Reading through Newsweek’s fascinating account of how President Bush (failed to) react to Katrina, I was struck by something I’ve written about here before: the very imperfect information flow from the field to decision-makers. Many interesting observations in the Newsweek article including:

When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was not up to the job and that the military, the only institution with the resources to cope, couldn’t act without a declaration from the president overriding all other authority… Bush’s leadership style and the bureaucratic culture combined to produce a disaster within a disaster.

Bears out my wider point about making sure that the situation on the ground, not the bureacratic instincts of potential intervention agencies, is the main driver of events.