Homeland Security - WTF?

Frankly, I'm willing to put aside my own partisan wailing for a moment and just raise what I feel is a truly non-partisan point: What exactly has the Department of Homeland Security been preparing for?

I know this point (and very likely, this very quote) has been made elsewhere, but in this WaPo article, we are told:

Federal authorities say there is blame enough to go around. In a news conference yesterday, Chertoff cautioned against "finger-pointing" and said no one had been equipped to handle what amounted to two simultaneous disasters -- the hurricane and subsequent levee break.

Okay, I'm going to avoid calling "bullshit", and just point out that FEMA themselves advised that this very problem was likely, and just point out that: 1. It's a hurricane in an area that is known to be subject to hurricanes and 2. It's a flood situation. These are basic problems that local, state and federal authorities have been preparing for since....hell, without researching it, we can safely say for well over half a century.

More importantly, let's just look at which activities DHS and/or FEMA failed miserably. A disaster hit a major US city, and we did not have Federal-level support on the ground at disaster-center for 5 days. Never mind evacuations, because we can almost understand the logistical constraints around that. There were no airdrops of food and water, no National Guard troops to stabilize and secure, and no official boats/aircraft to perform search and rescue.

According to the DHS website FAQ, one of their three primary responsibilities is to "minimize the damage from potential attacks and natural disasters." Given that it was known that a 40-year-record massive hurricane was headed towards the Gulf Coast two days in advance, wouldn't one think we should have been prepared to get security and rescue forces, and emergency food/water/medical supplies into the afflicted people sooner than 5 days?

As has been said many times before, if this is the reaction to a problem that was known in advance, what's going to happen if some organization does manage to set off a dirty bomb in Manhattan, or LA, or wherever? Are we going to have to listen to Chertoff explaining that nobody foresaw this happening in Minneapolis?

In my job, one of my major objectives is to deal with planning for what happens to a complicated system if a foreseeable problem happens, and to try to mitigate the impact of unforseeable problems. And we all know that it's inevitable that shit will happen. But shit people...we sure as hell don't have a $40 billion annual budget, but we're expected to triage a problem way quicker than 5 frigging days. So again I ask: What, exactly, has the DHS been preparing for?

In a previous post, a commenter suggested that withdrawing from Iraq would embolden our terrorist enemies, as it would be a sign of our weakness. Would not this completely ineffectual response to a known problem, which results in the prolonged suffering of hundreds and thousands of our own citizens, for no good reason, embolden them just as much?