By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
People around the world cannot believe what they're seeing.
From
Argentina to Zimbabwe, front-page photos of the dead and desperate in
New Orleans, almost all of them poor and black, have sickened them and
shaken assumptions about American might. How can this be happening,
they ask, in a nation whose wealth and power seem almost supernatural
in so many struggling corners of the world?
Pick the comparison:
New Orleans looks like Haiti, or Baghdad, or Sudan, Bangladesh or Sri
Lanka. The images of all the rubble and corpses and empty-eyed
survivors remind people of those places, not the United States.
"Third
World America," declared the headline in the Daily Mail in London on
Saturday. "Law and order is gone, gunmen roam at will, raping and
looting, and as people die of heat and thirst, bodies lie rotting in
the street. Until now, such a hellish vista could only be imagined in a
Third World disaster zone. But this was America yesterday."
International
reaction has shifted in many cases from shock, sympathy and generosity
to a growing criticism of the Bush administration's response to the
catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina. In nations often divided by dueling
sentiments of admiration and distaste for the United States, many
people see at best incompetence and at worst racism in the chaos
gripping much of the Gulf Coast. Many analysts said President Bush's
focus on Iraq had left the United States without resources to handle
natural disasters, and many said Hurricane Katrina's fury mocked Bush's
opposition to international efforts to confront global warming, which
some experts say contributes to the severity of such storms.
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