While I can understand the criticism of Bush and Co about the Katrina disaster, I think the real problem lies with the endemic US attitude of “we’re the superpower, we’re right, so we don’t need contingency plans just in case we’ve get things wrong”. Hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico are not exactly unknown; Katrina was originally forecast as one the most serve hurricanes, so surely the State or the Federal governments should have had some sort of emergency plans for various scales of disaster. Yet it seems to me that the politicians had no initial idea of how to confront and manage the magnitude of the crisis and resorted to “make it up as we go along” mode. The complications (far too trivial a word) in Iraq, the un-preparedness for 9/11 and its aftermath and now Katrina along with many more examples since WWII, can be explained, in my opinion, by an increasingly tunnel vision about the “faultlessness” of US philosophy. Maybe, just maybe, this disaster may make the majority of Americans (whom I adore individually) think about their vulnerability.