As many recent commentaries have noted, there was no unified command of Afghan “Mujahaddin” freedom fighters resisting the Soviet occupation of their country in the 1980s. There were about half a dozen major groups and a host of smaller ones.

The legendary commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, assassinated by OBL (Osama Bin Laden) agents just before The Atrocity, belonged to the “Jamiat” group led by Burhanuddin Rabbani. Qari Baba, the famous commander in Ghazni who looked like a cross between Buddha and Genghiz Khan, was part of the Harakat group. Ramatullah Safi was the most outstanding commander of the Gailani group.

This past week has seen a good many Reaganaut Reunions here in Washington DC. At several of them, we raised our glasses to toast Gorby - Mikhail Gorbachev. All of the Reagan Doctrine guys loved Gorbachev - but not quite in the same way as did the State Department squishes.

Mikhail Gorbachev seemed to burst from nowhere when he became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) and leader of the USSR in March of 1985. The liberal media swooned over the smiling suave telegenic Russian - so smart, so sophisticated, so capable of making a shining success of Soviet Communism! We did everything we could to encourage the swooning press’ delusion - for we knew the truth about Gorby.

We know conclusively that the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal is as phony as a Bill Clinton sex denial because there are no calls for the resignation of the one individual most responsible for the abuses.

That would be the officer in charge of Abu Ghraib and all US military prisons in Iraq, the commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski. And why have there been no calls for her resignation? Let’s be honest. It is because she is a woman.

Thus the frightening lesson of the abuse scandal: Political correctness trumps national security even in wartime.

In 1989 on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had a meeting in Prague, Czechoslovakia with a group of Anti-Communists dedicated to ridding their country from Soviet rule. Their leader was Martin Palous, a founder of the Charter 77 democracy movement.

He explained that when he and other Czech intellectuals such as Vaclav Havel formed Charter 77 in 1977, they did so against all hope. “To dream of real freedom for our country was unthinkable,” he said. “The best we could ask is some little bit of light, some small increase of breathing space for us to think and talk more freely.”

Then the world changed: Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States.

The most oft-quoted line of Walt Kelly’s comic strip Pogo of the 50s and 60s is “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Given that the liberal media has so clearly become cheerleaders for America’s defeat in Iraq, it is only appropriate that To The Point refer from now on to them as the Pogo Press.

Perhaps such a label will help the Bush White House to realize that the Pogo Press has become so suffused with Bush-hatred that it has become America’s Number One Enemy in the War on Terrorism. That is, the Pogos understand that America cannot be defeated militarily in Iraq, just as we couldn’t in Vietnam, and can only be defeated politically, which we were in Vietnam.

Thus they are determined to engineer a Vietnam-like political defeat in Iraq no matter how catastrophic the loss of Iraqi lives in a resultant civil war or the future of freedom for the entire Middle East or America’s capacity to defend itself against Al Qaeda terrorism - that’s all worth it in order to ensure George Bush’s defeat in November.

Playwright and socialism-advocate George Bernard Shaw famously declared a century ago that “We’re all socialists now” - meaning that socialist ideas had so permeated English society they were advocated however disguised even by their opponents.

The current hysteria over the “abuse” of Iraqi prisoners is evidence that American society has become so infected with envy-appeasing liberalism that “We’re all liberals now.”

Chinese are fond of compressing a social, political, or economic issue into a set of bullet points designated by the number of them. One of the most famous was “The Three Rounds,” encapsulating Chinese material dreams as they began emerging from the horror of Mao Tse Tung.

You were wealthy in post-Mao China if you possessed a watch, a bicycle, and a sewing machine -- the three “rounds.”

That was a quarter-century ago. Comparing the dream of having The Three Rounds to China’s economy today gives you an idea of how amazingly far China has traveled in that period. China has been speeding along a highway of wealth creation that has few parallels in history - yet now it looks like it is going to drive right off a cliff.

What is transforming the Chinese economy from a dream to a nightmare are The Three No’s: No Water, No Wives, and No Banks.

Cortez and his Spanish soldiers who conquered the Aztecs are known to history as “Conquistadors.” That label of “Conquerors” was applied to them by their contemporaries -- but it originated a generation earlier. It was first used to describe the Spaniards who liberated their own country from Islam.

Arab invaders had swept across Spain in the early 700s, and it took centuries for the Spanish to kick them out. Cortez was not yet 10 years old when they were finally ejected from their last stronghold in Grenada in 1492. When Cortez first looked upon the pyramid temples of the Aztec gods, he called them mezquitas -- mosques.

Cortez saw himself as a liberator -- just as his fathers had liberated Spain from the Islamic yoke, so he would liberate “New Spain” from the Aztec yoke. Yet he had little idea of how deep were the political-religious parallels between the Arabs and the Aztecs.

The parallels go beyond the death worship of Aztec warriors and Arab suicide-bombers. One of the latter responsible for the train bombings in Madrid declared in a letter: “You (Christians) love life -- we (Moslems) love death.” Compare this Aztec poem:

There is nothing like death in war
Nothing like the flowery death
So precious to the gods who give us life
Far off I see it! My heart yearns for it!

The deeper parallel is this: both the Arabs and the Aztecs invented a Religion of Jihad as a rationale to justify their imperialist empires.