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An innocent man, a prominent Havel-esque writer who fled Saddam Hussein's regime and dared to dream of bringing democracy to his homeland, was slaughtered today in Iraq.

A lemming hideously spurned his own and 6-9 other lives to achieve the objective of horribly trashing poor Izzadine Salim.

This in the grand game of ... (drum roll) ... impeding Iraq's democratic road.

The lemming was no doubt primed to explode himself. By:

- Promises from bearded fellows of lush and heavenly virgins (perhaps including Britney Spears) furiously reaching multiple orgasm over the thousand pieces of his body; or else by:
- Unmitigated hatred of the evil "brutal occupier" image of the United States; or else by:
- Copious amounts of amphetamines.

Or by various combinations of these and other inducements.

None of which require a tremendous level of worldliness or financial security on the part of the lemming.

Saddam would have approved. He paid (relatively) huge cash rewards to families of Jew-killing suicide bombers, proudly announcing this outstanding public spiritedness on pan-Arab television.

Meanwhile, sarin gas has been introduced into attacks on US troops. And that American man's head was cut off with a Crocodile Dundee-strength knife. While he was alive. By masked people yelling religious - religious! - incantations.

All of which seems much worse than the Abu-Ghraib-prisoner stuff, right?

Wrong, of course.

Beyond the initial reports, the emphasis amongst the usual culprits - as we all know - is on dismay at US failure, targeting Rumsfeld and Bush, boosting Kerry and smearing the US and its war effort.

The usual stuff.

Abu Ghraib remains the ongoing editorial and commentary focus of the self-styled anti-warriors who have finally stood up - lifting their arched bodies momentarily, from the ostrich position, to cheer Michael Moore.

Why else?


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It's a relief that Michael Jackson is not responsible for the Bush administration's PR, as WSJ's Daniel Henninger points out.

Yet while a heavy battle involving US soldiers is today raging in the holy city if Najaf, the New York Times' (Internet edition) lead item is about the prisoner abuse affair. This is the 4th or 5th straight day that theme has dominated headlines and editorials.

Today the newspaper highlights the US decision - made in the wake of a full-court media press and in the middle of a nasty, gut-wrenching war - to ban certain interrogation methods.

One implication of the item, of course, is that the Abu Ghraib business was the fault of sinister higher-ups, rather than the spawn of a few individuals, sensationalized and fake photographs, and the (now pregnant) lady who was photographed having sex with fellow soldiers and apparently claiming to have followed orders in so ... doing.

Another implication is that Times (of course!) knows better than the troops who resoundingly cheered Defense Secretary Rumsfeld yesterday when he told them he ignores newspapers.

But these same troops might be dead before the time of writing and might appreciate much, much more, as their families and friends and many thinking people would respect and heed more, the advice of Fox News foreign affairs analyst Mansoor Ijaz to Greta van Susteren yesterday:

" ... every person watching this program tonight, please, I implore you to get in touch with your congressmen and your senators and ask them one question: How is it that all of these people fighting our American men and women in the armed forces in Fallujah, in Karbala and all these other places where these firefights are going on, and so forth, are able to feed their families at night and still go out and do nothing but create hell for us all day long? Somebody's paying these people, and it is not, you know, Mr. al Sistani or Mr. al Sadr or any of these types of people. That money's coming from somewhere else.

"My judgment is that that money primarily is coming from Iran. It could also be coming from Syria. It could be counterfeit money, in some cases, and so forth. And what we have to do to stop that now is put the Iranian government on notice that we know. "

In other words, to successfully advance the mission of securing the United States and its allies from terror, which President Bush has set out to achieve since 9/11, layers will have to be peeled off beyond Iraq to eliminate financial and logistical sources in Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.

In today's Iraq, foreign support drives bomber-murderers and vigilantes like al-Zarkawi and al-Sadr.

They aim for the US to turn tail and run, leaving lawlessness unchecked and allowing the country to fall to radical anti-American rule. In embarrassing Bush to this extreme end - and in incidentally causing disaster for Iraq - they have evidently found cold and obsessed allies in the media, on the Democrat side of politics, in Europe and elsewhere.

One did not have to be a fortune teller to realize that such pockets of opposition were activated from the very beginning. Hence it is hard to fathom the Bush administration's failure to keep in check the liberal stronghold that is the American and European media, and some of the points in Henninger's article seem astute.

Meanwhile, how transparently disingenuous seems the politically-ended caterwauling over pictures taken at Abu Ghraib - next to, for example, the fortuitously timed videoed beheading of the Jewish American Nick Berg.

The prisoner photographs continue to be milked for much more than their worth. What a slur against the average intelligence of citizens, and what a misuse of intelligence that might have served US interests a lot better staying within Pentagon walls.

But the "drip, drip, drip" of endless "anti-war" allegations is the danger that overrides the real substance such allegations contain, for as William Safire points out, there are "those who want to use this scandal to justify their opposition to this war until the nation wearies of the conflict and the Bush administration can be ousted."

Such weariness and sadness - understandably - weighs heavily on many commentators, Congressmen and other elites. The recent steadiness, logical clarity and resolve of people like Safire and Charles Krauthammer next to others who have not quite so well held their nerve has been exemplary.

And still it's a long way out of the woods.

Surprise, surprise: the Bush is Bad News, which obtuse left-wing cartoonist Ted Rall hilariously calls a moderate & middle of the road newspaper, is today squealing for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation.

Having erected or jumped on every Bush bash bandwagon in recent memory the folk at the B is BN are goggle-eyed at the specter of return on investment : "The world is waiting now for a sign that President Bush understands the seriousness of what has happened." So says their editorialist (on behalf of the world).

The contortions of this short piece remind me of the way Vincent Price reads the dialogue in the old Alice Cooper hit song "The Black Widow", pretending a level tone at the beginning of an indefensibly grotesque monologue, then gradually deteriorating into a beastly and frothing I-told-you-so-I-was-right-I-... ruuuuuuuuuule-the-wooooooooorld ... explosion by the end.

Actually, the rule with beasts is: don't feed them.

Sometimes it can be tempting, and President Bush (and Rumsfeld before the so-called 9/11 Commission) succumbed to that temptation by proferring apologies. But the taste of blood has only incited the animals to stammer for more. No benefit, it is now quite obvious, will accrue to his presidency or Iraq-rebuilding efforts from caving in to that blood-lust.

When O'Neill departed Treasury the general perception was that the economy might fare better with a different custodian, as it has, but the same cannot be said with regard to Rumsfeld at Defence.

Look closely. If you think the picture shows a man with his (8 months) pregnant wife and 4 daughters, you're wrong. It is a man with 5 (dead) political pawns.

Sources close to ruthless billionaire Yasser Arafat today lauded as "heroic" the murder by Palestinians of the woman and 4 children shown here.

The police description of the manner in which the young family were killed rules out the possibility of some ghastly mistake:

"... (T)he white Citroen station wagon spun off the road after the initial shooting, then the attackers approached the vehicle and shot the occupants at close range."

O sweet victory. That's how the Palestinian and Arab media treated the disgrace, as a sweet victory.