In Katrina's Eye, Visions of America

But even this conservative daily, owned by media magnate Rupert Murdoch, does not dismiss the point, noting the evidence is ambiguous.

"Atlantic sea temperatures are at record highs compared with the past 50 years when such measurements have been taken. These rises could have given Katrina extra punch, but so may have its erratic path through the warmer waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

The Independent, in London, the United States had simply grown careless in recent years.

"Experts on the Mississippi Delta pointed out that a plan to shore up the levees around New Orleans was abandoned last year for lack of government funding. They noted that flood-control spending for southeastern Louisiana had been chopped every year that Mr Bush has been in office, that hurricane protection funds have also fallen, and that the local army corps of engineers has also had its budget cut. The emergency management chief for Jefferson parish told the Times-Picayune newspaper: 'It appears that the money has been moved in the President's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay.'"

Such criticism sounds self-righteous when bodies are still floating in the streets of New Orleans, but it's hardly the only example of Euro-indignation in the media.

"You'd expect that the richest, most technologically advanced nation in the world could have done a bit more than cry 'holy sh**!' and leg it for the hills," gibed Rob Greene, a commentator for Radio Netherlands But the Dutch, most of whom live below sea level, do know something about keeping the unruly seas at bay. After a terrible storm in 1953 that killed 1,835 people, they "made sure that flooding and destruction on that scale would never happen again by creating the greatest storm surge barrier in the world, known as the Delta project. "

Why didn't U.S. authorities do something similar, Greene asks? Because the population of the stricken region, is "largely poor and mainly black," he claims. "Not the kind of people on whose protection you'd spend a lot of money and effort, especially when that money and effort can be spent more profitably elsewhere, as in Iraq."

As glib as they are, these arguments do not come exclusively from anti-American sources. Even The Australian, an impeccably conservative Murdoch news organization, reports that the poor have paid the highest price for Katrina.

At a time when the full dimensions of the tragedy are still unfolding, such observations from overseas may strike Americans as premature or political or worse. But as the United States comes to grip with its worst natural disaster in many decades, the notion that the American government failed its people cannot be dismissed as entirely foreign.