I have no idea whether invading in preemptive fashion an oil-producing, Arab Muslim country without congressional approval is an impeachable or humanitarian act — or both. You see, it depends, in the manner that Trotsky’s photo used to, and then did not used to, appear in the snapshots of the Soviet pantheon. I suppose the same is true about prisoner abuse. I remember traveling in Europe and seeing those eerie black Klan-like hoods and capes with all sort of French, Italian and German sloganeering about the atrocious sexual humiliation that took place at Abu Ghraib, but I imagine this summer there won’t be much about supposed transgressions in Afghanistan where civilians were supposed to have been executed rather than humiliated. Things just happen, I suppose, in wars after 2009 — like now in Libya too.

I also have a sense, although it has never been quite so ordered by the Ministry, that a nut burning a bible is either artistic expression or a proper antidote to centuries of repression and so to be either applauded or ignored; but a nut burning a Koran evokes decapitations and murder and does so quite understandably — although I am never told quite why. Does it involve liberal paternalism and condescension: millions of Muslim radicals are captives of emotion and ignorant and thus not “like us,”so we must create much different standards for “them” that we don’t apply to others? We as adults laugh when symbols of Christianity are defaced in thousands of incidents; they as children naturally and understandably kill when one Koran is burned by one silly wannabe minister? Or is the Ministry’s fear that when Christ is satirized in a cartoon, no bomb shows up at the editorial office; when Mohammed is so caricatured, two do — and that because reporters are said always to be brave and publishers principled we cannot just admit to that?