Michael Totten has an interesting and clarifying essay about who the enemy is. It’s a restorative for those tired of arguing with people who mistakenly think that Iraq was a “distraction” from the “war on Al Qaeda.”

There is no Christian counterpart to what Saudi Arabia does. Imagine if the white supremacist “Christian Identity” movement (which includes David Duke among its adherents) made billions of dollars a year and founded churches throughout the Christian parts of the world to spread its hateful, racist, xenophobic ideology. Imagine if their brand of Christianity were the fastest growing on Earth, that they had also seized nation-states and used their powers to massacre millions. Whole swaths of the Christian world would look much like 1990s Yugoslavia, where Serbian Orthodox Christian supremacists did their worst to put the Muslim population of Europe to the sword.

On a related note, Steven den Beste says that we’re fighting a two-front war, some parts hot and some parts cold, and some of Europe (and indeed, many within the US itself) are on the other side. It’s long (as is often the case) but worth reading.

Andrew Sullivan has an appalling summary of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, and a suggestion for the president. He should take the advice.

And on a slightly different but related topic, how is “Ghraib” pronounced, anyway? I keep hearing people (including NPR people, who are usually sticklers about pronunciation, at least if it’s some trendy lefty country) saying “Grayb,” with a single syllable. I’m no Arabic expert, but I’d think that it should be “Grah-eeb.” Anyone know?

A Saudi Imam has praised the “resistance” to the American occupation of Iraq.

You may not be totally shocked to learn that he also laments that “our Palestinian brethren in Palestine are suffering from state terrorism by the Zionist entity, which carries out assassinations of Palestinian leaders,” while doing nothing to diminish their plight, other than supporting continued murder against innocent Israelis.

I wonder if the torture incident in Iraq will become this generation’s My Lai?

I’ve little to say except that, by providing fodder for anti-American propaganda, what these morons did certainly had the effect, if not the intent, of providing aid and comfort to the enemy. Given that this occurred in the land of Hammurabi, I’m tempted to suggest that they get the same treatment, with live broadcast rights to Al Jazeera, but it would actually be too good for them.

[Update a few minutes later]

It’s already happening, in Pravda. Note the headline.

That’s what Mark Steyn calls it.

The scale of the UN Oil-for-Fraud programme is way beyond any of the corporate scandals that so excite the progressive mind. Oil-for-Food was designed to let the Iraqi government sell a limited amount of oil in return for food and other necessities for its people. Between 1996 and 2003, Saddam did more than $100 billion of business, all of it approved by Kofi Annan’s Secretariat.

In return, by their own official figures, $15 billion of food and health supplies was sent to Iraq. What proportion of this reached the sick and malnourished Iraqi children is anybody’s guess. Coalition troops discovered stockpiles of UN food far from starving moppets. But let us assume there is an innocent explanation. Even so, by the UN’s own account, Oil-for-Food seemed to involve an awful lot of oil for not much food.

So where’s the media that couldn’t get enough of the Enron scandal?

This is too weird for words. Two robbers were killed trying to steal a bomb from a suicide bomber in Gaza.

My favorite part of the story:

There have been cases of rival groups stealing each other

John Weidner has some cogent commentary on a renewal of the draft.

Robert E. Lee once remarked that it was good that war was so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it. Some apparently want to make war too terrible for us, so that we are no longer able to make it terrible for those who wish to end us.

Trent Telenko has a thought-provoking post (along with a lot of good comments) on just how high the foreign-policy stakes are in this election.

Some people in Hamas think that it might be hard to carry out their blustering threats when their leaders are picked off almost as fast as they can name them.

“The Islamic and Arab world … expected the Palestinian Fatah and Hamas resistance movement combatants to take revenge for the bloodshed of martyr Sheikh Ahmed Yassin immediately,” he told the agency. “But [they] are unaware of the limitations and [the] amount of pressure imposed against the Palestinian combatants.”

Isn’t it a shame to disappoint “the Islamic and Arab world”? Not to mention their apologists in the west, who assure us daily that Israel’s tactics will just create more terrorism?

And this was interesting as well:

A leading Arab expert on Palestinian militant movements said in an interview that Hamas also might be deterred by the fear that a large-scale attack inside Israel would provoke Israel to kill Mr. Arafat

Well, this didn’t take long…