But McCain does have an Islamic problem, because Rev. Parsley's view that Islam is a false religion is a view that millions of Americans agree with. It's part and parcel of Pres. Bush's "clash of civilizations" argument, which was code for "only our side stands for civilization; the other side is barbaric." Our avid warmakers would be outraged if told that "shock and awe" is a sanitized way of describing terrorism, yet anyone on the ground in Baghdad was certainly terrorized. There's no doubt that an innocent Iraqi citizen is just as dead whether killed by American shrapnel or abducted in the dead of night and murdered by Shiite thugs who drill holes in his head. But viscerally it doesn't feel the same. Nor does public beheading feel the same as death by lethal injection. (Even though the latter has caused at least a few cases of prolonged agony.) Therefore, it's been easy for religionists and reactionaries to demonize Islam as a whole.

I've always felt that our rabid Christian preachers and their rabid mullahs are explicit enemies but implicit allies. Both support a misbegotten idea of what God demands -- total faith and unquestioning obedience. Both sides also skew and cheat about what the other actually believes. If you want to fuel prejudice, any religion can be made to look rigid, hide-bound, intolerant, and inhumane. Does it really matter when a bomb explodes in a busy night club whether it was thrown by a member of the IRA or al-Sadr's militia? When Christians fight Muslims to prove the supremacy of one religion over another, both have defiled their faiths.

What makes implicit allies out of explicit enemies boils down to one idea, the single worst idea ever promulgated: that God needs defending. America and Iraq have gone to war, implicitly, to preserve God's honor and uphold his truth. Yet the actual truth is that God doesn't need defending. What kind of problems could an almighty being have, after all? Personally, I am just as frightened by both sides when it comes to their ideology, because by common definition ideology is a form of false consciousness. An IRA terrorist and a Muslim suicide bomber kill innocent people on behalf of an abstract idea, having lost sight of their own inhumanity. Normal human beings wake up in the morning without the need to prove their piety by committing murder and violence.

Which brings us to McCain's central problem, which is that he shows signs of false consciousness born of ideology when it comes to the war. It's a distressing symptom in someone who otherwise seems to be guided by a steady moral compass. Without stopping to the dishonesty and misinformation that the Bush administration used to launch the war, McCain has arrived at the same doomed conclusion: this is a war of honor. Unfortunately, it isn't. It's a war of atavistic vengeance and tribalism on one side and militaristic nationalism and arrogance on the other. It would be easier if McCain only had a preacher problem when in actuality he has a God problem, specifically, an all-too-common American tendency to want to play God around the world.