No stock to sell short for Brand America

A note accompanying a link from a story about New Orleans, from one of my foreign correspondents:

My inbox has been flooded with news items like this on the same subject. Would I be correct in thinking that the New Orleans city officials are dysfunctional?

It was ages since Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans .... it took less than a year for Darwin, Australia to rebuild after a hurricane/cyclone combo hit there one Christmas day -- and totally flattened every single building, without exception.

Pictures from New Orleans showed serious flood damage after Katrina, but no evidence of tornado damage.

It is surprising for us folk outside the USA to think that the richest country cannot rebuild after a natural disaster of relatively small scale. (Katrina had little -- if any -- effect [in other places such as] in Seattle or North Dakota).

Have you ever seen the film The Man Who Would Be King, based on the Rudyard Kipling story? Power is tenuous--a slip and it's over. These days, asymmetric warfare mean that all the technology in the world may not be enough when your military is on the front lines (although why this wasn't learned 30 years ago in Vietnam escapes me).

The United States is at its nadir, both in terms of the image of foreign diplomacy and military power as it has been projected in the Mideast, and in terms of how people worldwide view the internal dysfunction of our nation, such as exhibited post-Hurricane Katrina.

There is only so much wealth to destroy, an ever limited supply of resources able to be wasted.

Speaking of this, I was reading an article a week or two ago in Wall Street Journal about Ford Motor Co. and the new CEO, Alan Mullaly, ex- of Boeing. The article mentioned how all the Ford execs are reading the book The Machine that Changed the World at Mullaly's behest. No wonder the company is f*ed. I read that book--about lean production and best practices in automobile manufacturing--in 1993! Where was Ford then?

You can only afford to destroy wealth for so long. Is the United States past the point of correction?
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This article from the New Yorker, "KNOWING THE ENEMY: Can social scientists redefine the “war on terror”?" is important and difficult. I need to read it a couple more times to fully understand the subtle and nuanced argument it makes. Although I find troubling that it avoids two major questions:

1. Why people from other countries, especially Islam, might have reason to not have "warm feelings" towards the U.S.?

2. Whether or not entering Iraq had anything substantive to do with the U.S. "war on terror."

Index Keywords: good-government