As offers of international aid to Katrina’s victims pour in, the Bush administration has relented on its earlier reluctance to accept help from abroad.

In a Thursday, September 1 interview with ABC, president Bush said he wasn’t “expecting much from foreign nations because we hadn’t asked for it. I do expect a lot of sympathy and perhaps some will send cash dollars. But this country’s going to rise up and take care of it.”

But the next day US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice said no offer of help would be refused.

The efficiency of the international response stands in stark contrast to the US federal government’s hesitant and confused relief efforts and highlights the Bush administration’s decision to gut the Federal Emergency Response Agency and place it in the hands of Michael Brown, whose previous emergency management experience consisted of settling disputes among Arabian horse owners, and Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, whose disaster relief experience is dwarfed by Brown’s.

More than 90 countries have offered asssistance to help the US recover from Hurrican Katrina, including long-time traditional US opponents such as Cuba and China— Cuba offering 1,100 doctors with full medical kits, and China pledging public and private money. Relief supplies have been arriving from the UK and other European nations for several days, and international aid is being coordinated by the US Agency for International Development in tandem with the United Nations.

Even Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, three of the poorest countries in the world, have offered cash to the US and the Red Cross. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez has offered gasoline and cash; Canada has offered the use of its Disaster Assistance Response Team and other resources.

Kuwait has offered $500 million in oil and cash, and other Middle East countries are sending emergency shelter equipment such as tents, cots and clothings.

Russia, Italy, Germany and France have all offered cash and whatever other assistance the US might request from them; to this point that means food, emergency shelter equipment and emergency kits including generators and water purifiers. The United Nations has offered help, which the State Department has accepted; UN personnel are working with the US Agency of International Development to coordinate the international aid.

The European Union and Nato are sending medical kits, meals, blankets and water trucks, and European countries including Bosnia have pledged cash and whatever other assistance the US needs. The EU is also sending oil. France has a hospital ship and aid workers standing by in the Caribbean. The Netherlands have already dispatched a naval vessel carrying drinking water, medical equipment and helicopters. Russia is also sending helicopters, generators and other heavy equipment.

Australia is sending disaster relief personnel and equipment. Japan and Israel have pledged cash along with emergency supplies and personnel.

Many countries, including the poorest, have made pledges to the Red Cross amounting to tens of millions of dollars.

As foreign nations mobilized to send support, the foreign press watched the US response, often in horror.

Pakistan’s The Nation

To augment the tragedy, the government of the world’s richest nation defied the general expectation that at the first sign of the storm it would muster an armada of ships, boats and helicopters for the rescue operation. For nearly three days it sat smugly apathetic to the people’s plight, their need for food, medicine and other basic necessities.

Kenya’s Daily Nation

My first reaction when television images of the survivors of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans came through the channels was that the producers must be showing the wrong clip. The images, and even the disproportionately high number of visibly impoverished blacks among the refugees, could easily have been a re-enactment of a scene from the pigeonholed African continent.

Switzerland’s Le Temps

The sea walls would not have burst in New Orleans if the funds meant for strengthening them had not been cut to help the war effort in Iraq and the war on terror… And rescue work would have been more effective if a section of National Guard from the areas affected had not been sent to Baghdad and Kabul… And would George Bush have left his holiday ranch more quickly if the disaster had not first struck the most disadvantaged populations of the black south?

France’s Liberation

Bush is completely out of his depth in this disaster. Katrina has revealed America’s weaknesses: its racial divisions, the poverty of those left behind by its society, and especially its president’s lack of leadership.

Turkey’s Radikal

The biggest power of the world is rising over poor black corpses. We are witnessing the collapse of the American myth. In terms of the USA’s relationship with itself and the world, Hurricane Katrina seems to leave its mark on our century as an extraordinary turning point.

Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine

Bush’s people will say that the moment of need and willingness to help should not be poisoned by political manoeuvres. Maybe this will serve them well enough in a media world where images of victims and heroes are valued more highly than complex background. But then the lie would have won – against the desire to understand things so as to avoid them.

Meanwhile, much of the US political press has turned its attention to the Bush administration’s attempts to spin their way out of the criticism leveled at them for their response to the disaster. The Washington Post and Newsweek in particular have given free reign to anonymous administration sources, coordinated by Karl Rove and White House communications director Dan Bartlett, seeking to lay the blame for deadly delays in disaster assistance on local and state officials.

ABC’s “This Week” featured commentator, Washington social institution and Louisiana political scion Cokie Roberts attempting to excuse Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff’s and FEMA head Michael Brown’s ignorance of the 25,000 refugees stranded at the New Orleans Convention Center by revising the timeline; she insisted that there weren’t 48 hours of news reports on the situation there before it registered with Chertoff and Brown. Noting the delay in sending assistance to the Convention Center, the BBC’s Paul Reynolds suggests that one lesson emergency management officials might want to take away from the disaster “is that someone senior should do nothing but monitor TV.”

Perhaps it’s important that the press report on concerns that the response to Katrina could damage the administration’s second-term agenda, but it’s absolutely certain the press have no obligation to assist the administration in lying their way out of trouble. For some reporters and commentators, though, that seems to have become priority number one.

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