The Islamic Republic operates in a sort of code, and the cypher is closely guarded by the small handful of grim-faced mullahs and ayatollahs who surround the Supreme Leader.

The terror war now extends to four continents--running from Thailand and Indonesia to India and Pakistan, down the Horn of Africa to Somalia and Yemen and back up to Afghanistan, on to Iraq, Palestine/Israel, Lebanon, and thence to Europe and the United States.

"We’ve got a lot of issues with Iran,” President Bush told a news conference last week. “The first is whether or not they will help this young democracy succeed,” he said, referring to Iraq. He said the “second issue” was whether Iran would help the Lebanese government, and that the “big issue” was “whether or not Iran will end up with a nuclear weapon.”

The stuff about Islam was predictably discussed in the usual context of political correctness, according to which it is always wrong to criticize another person's beliefs, and very wrong to criticize the beliefs of a foreign "culture."

But despite the fundamental importance of religion, most of our sages and scribblers are poorly equipped to deal with it, as you can see from the awkward coverage of the pope's speech at Regensberg. It was, as you’d expect from a pope, a religious text, but the religious content was rarely reported, aside from Benedict’s remarks about Islam--themselves a part of a broader religious message aimed primarily at Europeans.

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