Guardian Article Nails Down World View of U.S.

[Dravyk]

Here is a very well-written article in the UK's Guardian, that I'm recommending is worth a full read.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/...562902,00.html


Here's some snippets:

The waters flow in and the waters flow out, washing away all that once lay on the surface -and revealing what lies beneath. So it is with all floods in all places, but now it is America which stands exposed. And neither America nor the world much likes what it sees.

Most Americans want to believe that kind of inequality belongs in the past, in the school textbooks. But Katrina has shaken them from that delusion.

They have had to face another painful truth. Their government has proved itself incompetent. Yes, it could act quickly once it had decided to act - but it idled for days. This disastrous performance will surely saddle the remainder of George Bush's presidency, just as the botched Desert One rescue of American hostages from the besieged US embassy in Tehran hobbled that of Jimmy Carter. Americans expect competence from their leader as a minimum requirement. And if an image of a crashed helicopter in the Iranian desert could undo one president, surely pictures of an American city reduced to a Somali or Bangladeshi kind of chaos spell disaster for this one.

Finally, America will have to get over the shock of seeing itself in a new, unflattering light. It is not just the lawlessness, violence and gun culture that has been on show in New Orleans. It is also that America likes to think of itself as the "indispensable nation", the strongest, richest, most capable country on the face of the earth.

That belief had already taken a few blows. The vulnerability exposed on 9/11 was one. The struggle in Iraq - where America has become a Gulliver, tied down - was another. But now the giant has been hit again, its weak spot exposed. When corpses float in the streets for five days, the indispensable nation looks like a society that cannot take care of its own. When Sri Lanka offers to send emergency aid, the humiliation is complete.