The media cliché is that the American public is troglodytic and has no interest in things foreign. As with so many other things that is pure projection. It is the media who have little interest in things foreign, even when they are life and death matters. As Mark Steyn ^[1] observes of the Grub Street residents at yesterday’s Allawi/Bush press conference…

They’re six feet from Iraq’s head of government and they’ve got not a question for him. They’ve got no interest in Iraq except insofar as they can use the issue to depress sufficient numbers of swing voters in Florida and Ohio.