Ignatieff on the broken contract Katrina represents

I'm not a big fan of Michael Ignatieff's work, although I've tried. His book, Blood and Belonging, though initially promising, ends up resting on a rather loopy Freudian argument. Same goes for The Warrior's Honor. His book on Human Rights -- his essays and responses by other thinkers -- is most interesting for the commentary by the other writers in the book. And his media arguments regarding the Iraq War and the GWOT (or its latest manifestation - I like GCAVE for its humor value) have simply been wrong. His earlier book, The Needs of Strangers, however, is worth a read for its learnedness and historical sources even if his own arguments are often derivative and sometimes unacknowledgedly so.

This article from the NY Times (here in Truthout) is worth a read -- it follows a similar trajectory to the Strangers book. Although we may come from different theoretical and political perspectives (for instance, he uses the language of social contract), this is a nice article.