FOUR years ago today unimagined horror came to America with the 9/11 attacks. Last week a fresh tragedy struck the US when Hurricane Katrina smashed into the Gulf coast, devastating New Orleans and neighboring Mississippi. History already knows the bitter consequences of the United States’ reaction to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. What effect if any will the catastrophe resulting from Katrina have on America’s worldview — for instance, on the way its people, if not its politicians, understand the disaster that Washington’s ill-considered intervention has brought about in Iraq?
Though politicians and commentators are often seized by the idea that the cataclysms of the moment dwarf anything that has ever gone before, they are generally wrong. In December 1941 the Japanese attack on the unsuspecting US Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor brought America storming into a world war which it had long tried to stay out of. American intervention ensured the defeat of Nazi Germany and then Japan. Unfortunately, critical miscalculations by the ailing US President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the 1944 Yalta Conference along with Stalin and Churchill condemned the countries of Eastern Europe to fifty years of Soviet dictatorship.
In 1906 San Francisco was devastated by an earthquake and fire in which more than 3,000 people perished. As now in New Orleans, the San Francisco mayor issued a shoot-to-kill order against looters and other criminals. As in New Orleans, offers of help, including money from the Chinese emperor poured in. However unlike George W. Bush today, the then US President Theodore Roosevelt turned down all outside assistance.
This week Americans still seem bewildered, even humiliated, that they were hit by a calamity which for over a week appeared utterly beyond their normal can-do powers to fix. That humiliation has been seen clearly in many talk show comments which expressed bitter incredulity that the most powerful country on earth was being offered — and is accepting — aid from countries such as Afghanistan, Mexico and even recently unpopular France. The anger and frustration arising from the US impotence has produced a blame game. The rising tide of recrimination over who failed to do what about Katrina’s awesome destruction may even blunt the mourning today for the victims of 9/11 attacks.
The world reacted with massive sympathy to the 9/11 atrocity. Washington squandered that sympathy completely when it invaded Iraq on trumped-up evidence. Once again, however, the world has rallied to the US in the wake of the ruin caused by Katrina.
When tempers have finally cooled, dare we hope that Americans will have learned the lesson, however incredible to their insular self-view, that even a superpower needs the support and good will of others? Or will the blinkers stay on and the dangerous self-absorbed and ill-informed worldview continue?
Americans can weep for themselves but can they also weep for the world? They must not forget that today, after Katrina, and four years ago, after 9/11, the world wept for America.
