BBC News:
A public holiday - National Sovereignty Day - has been declared, and the capital, Baghdad, threw a giant party to mark the eve of the changeover.
Hours before the Monday night deadline, four US soldiers were killed in combat.
US-led combat operations are due to end by September 2010, with all troops gone from Iraq by the end of 2011.
Of course, this didn't get a lot of coverage here, the news having been pretty much canceled in honor of the death of Michael Jackson. Over 4,000 Americans have lost their lives to bring Iraq to this point and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died, but one man's death -- even if we was a reclusive, Howard Hughes type who was previously the object of ridicule -- is much more important than all of them. In our celebrity-obsessed culture, you don't matter and neither do all those people who lost their lives way-the-hell-and-gone over in Iraq. The oddest thing here is that Michael Jackson didn't really matter much before he died -- the fact is that he was sort of a has-been.
I see I'm in danger of writing what's becoming the worst obit ever. This post isn't about Michael Jackson, but about the media and Iraq. We should be all about Iraq today, but the mainstream media has the attention-span of a butterfly. Better yet, a moth. That moth is drawn toward the sensational as if it were a flame and all our attention goes there with it. If something sensational happens and something substantial happens, off we go to wonder at the sensationalism. The substantial -- the work of years and billions of dollars and supertankers worth of blood -- can just wait... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
