The breakdown of order in New Orleans, the looting and the mobs, the state of emergency and shoot-to-kill policy, do not look like something that should happen in the world's only superpower.

Ray Nagin, mayor of New Orleans, told people to leave the city before the hurricane struck. But many poor people did not have the cars or the financial means to pay to get out of New Orleans or to pay for somewhere else to stay. The elderly poor would have found it physically very difficult to make the trip. Most of the people who have died in Katrina's wake have been black.