Press criticises US response to hurricane

According to German broadsheet Süddeutsche Zeitung: “The shock waves of Katrina have hit the United States deeply, comparable only to the collective concussions after 9/11. […] Back then, after 9/11, patriotism and stubborn defiance suffocated political discussions on the negligent nonchalance with which the risk of terror was treated before the attacks. But this time, the question of political responsibility emerged immediately. The President stands in the centre of the storm, and it is growing stronger. For George W. Bush it could become the most dangerous political storm during his mandate”. 

According to British newspaper the Daily Mail, the recent tragedy in the US has exposed the same weakness as the conflict in Iraq: “Here is a country that is able to overthrow a dictator if it chooses, but is so immersed in the outcome of a war that it is incapable of reacting accordingly to the problems of hundreds of thousands of its own citizens effected by a natural disaster”. 

Belgian daily Le Soir criticised the US for being the “richest country in the world” yet “leaving its weakest, most vulnerable, poor, sick, old and needy to face a preventable and foreseen catastrophie”. 

The Spanish daily newspaper El Mundo stressed that the tragedy “highlights the weaknesses of a country so preoccupied by its imperialist adventures, that it is neglecting its most valuable asset – the wellbeing of its people”. 

British broadsheet The Guardian declared: "America is the richest and most powerful country on earth, but its citizens, begging for food, water and help, are suffering agonies more familiar from Sudan and Niger”. It claims: “The worst of the third world has come to the Big Easy”. 

In the German daily newspaper Die Welt, Michael Streck commented on the effect the disaster will have on the way America is perceived by its own public: “Hurricane Katrina will bury itself into the American consciousness in the same way 9/11 or the fall of Saigon did. The storm did not just destroy America's image of itself, but also has the power to bring an end to the Republican era sooner than expected. America is ashamed.” 

The large number of black underclass stranded in New Orleans without food or shelter has also brought a racial dimension to the disaster. Philippe Grangereau in France’s Liberation said: “Bush is completely out of his depth in this disaster. Katrina has revealed America's weaknesses: its racial divisions, the poverty of those left behind by its society, and especially its president's lack of leadership.” 

This sentiment is echoed by Eugenio Scalfari, a leading left wing Italian editor in La Reppublica: “The catastrophe had placed before the eyes of the United States and the world the reality of extreme inequality, and extreme degradation,'. Scalfari continues to say: 'It has also shown the extreme fragility of the leading country of the Western world, and of the values it wants to export and of which it pretends to be the main source, but which are absent in its own country a century and a half after the war of secession.' 

Le Monde credits the hurricane with highlighting “the country’s social inequalities”. It says: “Despite the economic and military strength it is prepared to deploy overseas, the United States has shown itself incapable of dealing with a catastrophe of this scale at home.”