LONDON: 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 duelling 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 has left the United States without resources to handle natural disasters, and many said Hurricane Katrina’s fury mocks Bush’s opposition to international efforts to confront global warming, which some experts say contributes to the severity of such storms. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service