Demagogue

I wonder how much play has been given in American media to the rather serious story involving British troops in Basra, in the relatively calm part of Iraq the Brits have been occupying since the war. If you don't know, the Iraqi president has acknowledged that the police force is riddled with insurgents and insurgent sympathisers, and a couple of British soldiers who had been put into jail were handed over by the jailers to the insurgents. It's really a big story, but I wonder whether the American press will cover it much since it doesn't involve Americans--even though it has serious implications for the American zone and for the American project of supposedly training the Iraqi security forces so that they can take over and we can leave.

I ask because of how high on the agenda the news from the U.S. has been. The Katrina story was the top on the Dutch TV news for days before the hurricane hit. I was watching interviews on Dutch TV with the New Orleans mayor regarding evacuation two days before the hurricane arrived. Naturally, after the horrifying scenes that followed Katrina's landfall, Rita has been the lead story on the Dutch and British news for quite a while already.

When you're an expat, one of the things that brings home to you how important our country is is how much attention everyone else pays to it--especially as compared to how much attention we pay to everyone else. As a program (or should I say programme) I saw here on Tuesday evening regarding anti-Americanism in Britain put it, perhaps what really pisses off Europeans is the fact that Americans, generally speaking, think Europe is irrelevant in today's world.