How Could This Be Happening in the United States?

By Kevin Sullivan

Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, September 4, 2005; Page A12

LONDON, Sept. 3 -- People around the world cannot believe what they're seeing.

From Argentina to Zimbabwe, front-page photos of the dead and desperate in New Orleans, almost all of them poor and black, have sickened them and shaken assumptions about American might. How can this be happening, they ask, in a nation whose wealth and power seem almost supernatural in so many struggling corners of the world?