How Could This Be Happening in the United States?

Israel's most watched television news program, Channel 2 news, on Friday broadcast extensive footage from New Orleans showing uncovered corpses with commentary saying that no one was tending to the dead. The program also aired a video clip of Bush searching for words, before saying he was dissatisfied with the government's response. The newscaster's narration suggested the Bush administration had placed a higher priority on ensuring a steady flow of gasoline than on saving lives.

On Chinese Web sites, which have covered the disaster closely, several postings contrasted the Chinese army's relief role in recent floods and earthquakes with the U.S. response in New Orleans. "Hundreds of thousands of . . . soldiers were sent to those places to help local residents, and they really did a good job," one posting said. "But the United States, a superpower, only sent several thousand soldiers to help. What a shame!"

In other countries, commentators have linked Katrina to the dangers of global warming, and Bush's opposition to the Kyoto protocol on climate change. "This horror is the worst possible way of realizing how important climate change is," Marcelo Cantelmi wrote in an Aug. 31 editorial in the Clarin newspaper in Buenos Aires. German Environment Minister Juergen Trittin wrote in an article this week that Katrina should be a wake-up call to the Bush administration to change its policies on global warming.

Others said the looting and chaos in New Orleans reflected a culture of violence in the United States. The English-language Times of India on Saturday published a quote from Sajeewa Chinthaka, a 36-year-old from Sri Lanka, where the tsunami killed more than 30,000: "It's disgusting. Not a single tourist caught in the tsunami was mugged. We can easily see where the civilized part of the world's population is."

The issue of race underlies much of the global dismay over the situation in New Orleans. The United States is seen as a land of opportunity for some, with less for people of color. Every year, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans sneak into the United States for work, while in Mexico, human rights groups blast the treatment of Hispanics in the United States. African refugees flee war and famine and find new lives in the United States, but they also find a society where minorities are disproportionately the poorest.

The issue has resonated in East African countries such as Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya, where newspaper columnists and radio personalities have blasted the U.S. government for its slow aid to victims. Among the victims are a "disproportionately high number of visibly impoverished blacks," wrote Ambrose Murgunga on Saturday in Kenya's Daily Nation newspaper.

In Pakistan, the English-language newspaper the Nation wrote in an editorial Saturday that the U.S. government "for three days sat smugly apathetic to the people's plight," noting that the largely black victims highlighted "the inequality of wealth that continues to mark the U.S. racial divide till this day."

In Turkey, columnist Sami Kohen wrote in Friday's Milliyet newspaper the looting "showed 'the other face' of USA. It became clear that the number of poor and unemployed people is seriously high and their problems had been ignored."

In the Daily Mail of London on Saturday, columnist Anthony Holden said his affection for the United States had always been tempered by its "me-first" attitude. He said the largely poor and black victims of Hurricane Katrina showed that while prosperity had come to some American blacks and other minorities, many more had been left behind.

"Rarely," he wrote, "has such lurid evidence of the darker side of the American dream been so brutally exposed."

Correspondents John Lancaster in New Delhi, Scott Wilson in Jerusalem, Craig Timberg in Johannesburg, Monte Reel in Buenos Aires, Molly Moore in Paris, Emily Wax in Nairobi, Anthony Faiola in Tokyo, Edward Cody and Philip P. Pan in Beijing, Ellen Nakashima and Alan Sipress in Jakarta, Indonesia, Peter Finn in Moscow, N.C. Aizenman in Islamabad, Pakistan, Craig Whitlock in Berlin, Karl Vick in Istanbul, staff writer Mary Beth Sheridan in Washington and special correspondent Omar Fekeiki in Baghdad contributed to this report.