It's time for the week's description of local foibles. The best one was Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos taking credit for the recent UN agreement in Iraq. See, when Spain pulled out its troops, it showed the Americans how serious the situation was and made them rush to negotiate with the Frogs and the Toads. Never mind that the Americans got what they wanted out of the agreement, we must find some way to make Spain a protagonist, even if it isn't.

Spaniards can get prickly with Americans over World War II, which was the beginning of unquestioned American world primacy (not dominance). Americans, quite justifiably, tend to see WWII as the most recent refounding of the national ethos. Spain, which wasn't even part of it, feels left out by all this commemoration of the Normandy landings. This is why they tend to give a lot of press to the complaints of the defeated Germans--that we bombed their civilians, that a lot of them got ethnically cleansed from Eastern Europe (both true), and that mistreatment in Allied POW camps caused a huge amount of deaths (true for those in Russian hands, not true for those in Western

This goddamn post has been eaten three times. I'll rewrite it again, I suppose.