They never saw it coming

Never before have so many expected so little.

"I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."

-- Condoleezza Rice

"That 'perfect storm' of a combination of catastrophes exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody's foresight."

-- Michael Chertoff, on Hurricane Katrina

"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did anticipate a serious storm. But these levees got breached. And as a result, much of New Orleans is flooded."

-- President George W. Bush, on Hurricane Katrina.

"Clearly, this was not something that we expected to happen."

- George W. Bush's transportation chief on I-35 Bridge collapse.

"I don’t know anybody who had any reasonable expectations about the number or the length of the war or the cost of the war. I just don’t — no one I know went out and said these are how those three metrics ought to be considered. And you can take it to the bank."

-- Donald Rumsfeld

"One of the mistakes I made in my assumptions going in was that [...] the Iraqi Army, given the opportunity, would stand together for the Iraqi people and be available to them to help serve the new nation, [but] they disintegrated in the face of the coalition's first several weeks of combat, so they weren't here."

-- Gen. Peter Pace

"I was aware a lot of these practices were going on, I had no notion of how significant they had become until very late. I didn't really get it until very late in 2005-2006."

-- Alan Greenspan, on subprime mortgage problems.

"I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators."

-- U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney.

U.S. Leaders. They never saw it coming. Any of it.

--WKW