By Jefferson Morley
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Friday, September 2, 2005 9:39 AM

In the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, the world media sees an appalling human tragedy and some lessons for the sole remaining superpower.

Mostly, sympathy abounds. Russia offered cargo planes and rescue helicopters. Cuba's national assembly observed a minute of silence in "sorrow and solidarity." The president of Sri Lanka, recalling the spontaneous U.S. assistance in response to the tsunami nine months ago, sent condolences. So did President Hu Jintao of China. Even the leaders of Old Europe are offering their own emergency oil supplies, even if some substantial portion of the fuel will likely wind up in the tanks of that quintessentially American vehicle, the gas-guzzling SUV.

In an online world, people everywhere feel America's pain, if only because it is their own as well.

In Honduras, El Heraldo (in Spanish) reports that the killer storm threatens to cut off the money sent back by some 25,000 expatriates working in the New Orleans area. In South Africa, the Johannesburg Star laments that the killer storm in America will likely boost local petrol prices internationally. "When the United States of America sneezes," the editors note, " the whole world will catch its cold."

At the same time, more than a few observers seized the opportunity to point out what they see as evidence of America's shortcomings. They discern in the disaster and its agonizing aftermath a reflection of less than admirable U.S. policies such as environmental neglect, imperial hubris and social callousness.

Jurgen Trittin, Germany's environmental minister, wrote an editorial lashing out at President Bush for "closing his eyes" to the dangers of global warming. Spiegel Online, the Web site of a leading German newsweekly, noted Trittin's remarks in an English-language file that was picked up by the Drudge Report, prompting a deluge of patriotic responses, some of which defended American values with unprintable obscenities.

The Washington Post's Craig Whitlock notes the political opportunism lurking behind Trittin's attack. As Germany's hotly contested parliamentary election enters its final weeks, everyone knows that taking potshots at Bush wins votes in Berlin as reliably as mocking the French does in Texas.

The view that America is paying for its neglect of global warming was echoed in a commentary on the German broadcast network Deutsche Welle. The piece asserts the global warming connection as fact: "Even as the damage caused by hurricane Katrina in the US is assessed, the reason for its brutality is already known -- global warming. It underlines yet again there is no alternative to global climate protection."

While such categorical assertions are viewed skeptically by some, says the Sydney Morning Herald, "finance markets have penetrated to the heart of the matter - the effect on the bottom line. Actuaries already expect the cost of natural disasters brought on by global warming to double in the next decade, and are aligning insurance premiums to match."

(Incidentally, Swiss Re, a leading reinsurance firm -- they sell insurance to insurance companies -- expects Katrina will generate $20 billion of insurance claims, according to Swissinfo. )

The global warming rhetoric can be, well, overheated, as The Times of London illustrates with some useful historical evidence.

"Hurricanes follow a 50-year cycle," the editors note. "In the 1950s, thirty-seven tropical storms hit the US, of which ten were major hurricanes. In the 1990s, when fears of climate change began to bite, the US had just nineteen such storms, of which only five were major hurricanes. It is possible, therefore, that we are seeing nature repeat itself."

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.