Opinion: In the Atlantic Monthly a few years back, Robert D Kaplan went to Liberia, Sierra Leone and other failed jurisdictions of west Africa and concluded that many of the "citizens" of these "states", roaming the streets raping and killing, belonged to a phenomenon called "re-primitivised man".
Anyone watching TV in recent days will have seen plenty of "re-primitivised man", not in Liberia or Somalia but in Louisiana. New Orleans cops joining in the looting at Wal-Mart, gangs firing on a children's hospital and on rescue helicopters, hurricane victims being raped in the New Orleans convention centre. If you're minded, as many of the world's anti-Americans are, to regard the United States as a depraved swamp, it was a grand old week: Mother Nature delivered the swamp, but plenty of natives supplied the depravity.
Not all of them, of course. But it doesn't really matter if it's only 5 per cent or 2 per cent or 0.01 per cent if everybody else is giving them free rein. Not exactly the most impressive law enforcement agency even on a good day, the New Orleans Police Department sent along some 80 officers to rescue the rape victims trapped in the centre, but were beaten back by the mob.
Meanwhile, the ever more pitiful governor was, unlike many of her fellow Louisianans, safe on dry land but still floundering way out of her depth, unable to stand up to the lawlessness even rhetorically or to communicate anything other than emotive impotence. With most disasters, it's a good rule to let the rescue teams do their work and leave the sniping till folks are safe. But in New Orleans this last week, the emergency work has been seriously hampered by actual literal sniping.
The authorities lost control of the streets. Which one of Tom Ridge's homeland security colour codes does that fall under? After 9/11, many people who should have known better argued that it was somehow a vindication of government.
"One of the things that's changed so much since September 11th," agreed vice-president Cheney, "is the extent to which people do trust the government - big shift - and value it, and have high expectations for what we can do." Hard to see why he'd say that. 9/11 was an appalling comprehensive failure of just about every relevant federal agency. The only government that worked that day was local and state: the great defining image, redeeming American honour at a moment of national humiliation, is of those brave New York firemen pounding up the stairs of the World Trade Center.
What consolations can be drawn from the lop-sided tango between slapdash bureaucrats and sub-human predators in New Orleans? To be fair, next door, Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi has been the Giuliani of the hour, and there are many tales of great courage, like the teams from the children's hospital of Alabama who've been helicoptering in to New Orleans to rescue newborn babies.
The comparison with September 11th isn't exact, but it's fair to this extent: Katrina was the biggest disaster on American soil since that day provoked the total overhaul of the system and the devotion of billions of dollars and the finest minds in the nation to the prioritising of homeland security. It was, thus, the first major test of the post-9/11 structures.
Happy with the results? Muhammad Yousef Al-Mlaifi, director of the Kuwaiti ministry of endowment (and no, I've no idea what that means, though feel free to do your own jokes), wrote a hurricane essay arguing the novel line that The Terrorist Katrina Is A Soldier Of Allah.
You could sort of see his point. Imagine if al-Qaeda were less boneheaded and had troubled themselves to learn a bit more about the Great Satan's weak spots. Imagine if they'd decided to blow up a couple of levees and flood a great American city.
Would local and state government have responded any more effectively than they did last week? After all, Katrina, unlike Osama, let 'em know she was coming. The nation's taxpayers will be asked to rebuild New Orleans. The rationale for doing so is that it is a great city of national significance. Fine. But, if it's of national significance, what have all the homeland security task forces been doing these last four years? Why is the defence of the city still left to a system of levees each with its own individual administrative regime?
If it's of national significance, why did the porkmeisters of the national legislature and national executive branch slash a request by the Army Corps of Engineers for $105 million for additional flood-protection measures there down to just over $40 million, at the same time they approved a $230 million bridge to an uninhabited Alaskan island?
Given that the transport infrastructure's already in place, maybe it makes more sense to rebuild New Orleans in Alaska.
In 2001, one thing that became clear two or three months after "the day that everything changed" is that nothing changed - that huge swathes of the political culture in America remain committed to a bargain that stiffs the people at every level, a system of lavish funding of pseudo-action. You could have done as the anti-war left want and reallocated every dollar spent in Iraq to Louisiana.
Or you could have done as some of the rest of us want and reallocated every buck spent on the laughably misnamed "farm bill" subsidising Ted Turner's hobby-farming activities.
But, in either case, I'll bet Louisiana's kleptocrat public service would have pocketed the dough and carried on as usual - and, come the big day, the state would still have flopped out and New Orleans's foul-mouthed mayor would still be ranting about why it was all everybody's else fault.
Those levees broke: they failed. And you think about Chicago and San Francisco and Boston and you wonder what's waiting to fail there. The assumption was that after 9/11 big towns and small took stock and identified their weak points. That's what they told us they were doing, and that's what they were getting big bucks to do.
But in New Orleans no one had a plan that addressed levee failure, and no one had a plan for the large percentage of vehicle-less citizens who'd be unable to evacuate, and no one had a plan to deal with widespread looting. Given that all these local factors are widely known - New Orleans is a city below sea level with high crime and a low rate of automobile ownership - it makes you wonder how the city would cope with something truly surprising - like, say, a biological attack.
Oh, well, maybe the 9/11 commission can rename itself the Katrina Kommission. Back in the real world, America's enemies will draw many useful lessons from the events of this last week.
Will America?