spinbadz own

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.