Anyone who pays attention knows that today the Sunni-backed Awakening Councils were handed over to the primarily Shia goverment of Iraq. The jist, of course, is that in the nation of snoozers no one is paying attention to anything.

The provided link is to an Agence France-Presse story. If you head to CNN, Fox News or MSNBC there isn’t the first lick about Iraq anywhere to be found. Presumably the stuff about reality TV shows and celebrity gossip trump major international policy, or at least they do here. If you go to the BBC Web site you at least can find something near the bottom.

This is all circumspect in modern age. “The surge worked” is the mantra and that’s that, why are we still talking about it? If you’ve got at least a functioning brain stem, which automatically excludes a good 90% of the nation, you can probably riddle out that saying “the surge worked” at this point is kind of like saying “the house is built” when the first shipment of lumber arrives. What happens in the next few days and weeks will be the first and only indication of whether we have cobbled together a workable system. If things sour then it will not only sound the last hurrah for U.S. policy in the region but will likely bury the Republican Party alive in the November election. The American public has been sold on the inevitable victory and has boxed up their belongings ready to move in. If we arrive to find our new reality built on a rotton structure the “awakening” here will be neither gentle nor pleasant. Needless to say, with a growing and souring campaign in Afghanistan the political will to recommit in Iraq is nonexistent.

The other possibility (and anything is possible on this cracked planet) is that the Awakening Councils will either be absorbed by the new government or reintegrate peacefully into society. This could either be a genuine transformation or an intentional effort to keep the lid on the pot for a bit longer. The nature of American politics is that if Iraq fell apart on Jan. 21 it will immediately be blamed on the guy still trying to work his crease into the executive chair. If the change is genuine and sparks a new era for Middle Eastern political processes then President George W. Bush will indeed laugh all the way to his best-selling memoirs.

I’m not in any way prepared to pick one limb on this gargantuan tree and stake my claim. There are simply too many possibilities and too many players and too many things that could go right or go wrong. But the apathy and ignorance of American citizens is truly appalling. Blaming the media is like blaming Wal-Mart for stocking shoddy stuff. Media outlets give people what they want; gossip, no news about yet another bailout attempt and pictures of Kim Kardashian’s gigantic butt. The fact is, denizens of the Republic either do not care or are enmeshed in the belief that all is well and there is nothing further to report.

For the dozen or so actually interested in the future of American policy in the Middle East, the next few days and weeks certainly will be worth watching.