Original version published in The Moscow Times, June 27, 2003. So now we know. After all the mountains of commentary and speculation, all the earnest debates over motives and goals, all the detailed analyses of global strategy and political ideology, it all comes to down to this: George W. Bush waged war on Iraq because, in his own words, God “instructed me to strike at Saddam.” This gospel was revealed, appropriately enough, in the Holy Land this week, through an unusual partnership between the fractious children of Abraham. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz was given detailed minutes of a negotiating session

More of the peculiar brand of freedom that Bush has brought to Afghanistan:

Editor of Afghan women’s magazine arrested (via AP)
Excerpt: The editor of an Afghan women’s rights magazine was jailed after a presidential adviser accused him of publishing un-Islamic material — including an article critical of the practice of punishing adultery with 100 lashes, officials said Friday. Minority Shiite Muslim clerics in Kabul objected to that article and another in the monthly Haqooq-i-Zan— or Women’s Rights — that argued that giving up