"Here is a superpower that can crush at will a tinpot dictatorship but then becomes so bogged down in the grisly aftermath of war that it finds itself unable to respond to anything like adequately to the plight of tens of thousands of its own citizens engulfed by a natural calamity," said Britain's Daily Mail newspaper.

"President Bush, his ratings already in free-fall, could pay a high price indeed for his military folly," it said.

Gun-toting looters pillaging stores in the streets, bodies floating in the waters, levees unable to hold back the water, and tales of rape and squalor in the main emergency refuge, the New Orleans Superdome, left foreign commentators stunned.

"Young men have not only been looting with impunity but firing on National Guardsmen. And the authorities still have no idea how many people may have died," London's conservative Daily Telegraph said.

"In Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama over the past four days, the United States has been struggling to provide the basic necessities of life - food, water and medicine - to the victims of Hurricane Katrina," London's Daily Telegraph said. "Take New Orleans alone. The breached levees remain unrepaired. About 20,000 refugees have been living in appalling squalor in the Superdome sports stadium."

France's Figaro newspaper headlined: "America overwhelmed by catastrophe."

The left-wing Liberation recalled how the Kobe earthquake had humbled a major power.

"But the lesson of New Orleans is even darker," it said.

"A modern city that sinks under the waters and into anarchy is a cruel spectacle for an absolute champion of security like (US President George W.) Bush, who incidentally seems out of his depth," it said.

An apparent lack of preparation for the crisis staggered many papers.

"What really stands out is the clear insufficient investment and contingency measures to protect the population of the Mississippi Delta from a forecast disaster," the paper said.

In Portugal the right-leaning daily Diario de Noticias likened the images of the crisis to a disaster movie or "Liberia or some another Third World nation in trouble."