Whatever would we do without Fouad Ajami, Fareed Zakaria, and Bernard Lewis? With their combination of consistent sanity and in-depth understanding of the Arab world, these guys are the cream of the crop.

Don't Let Arafat Distract Us is a useful reminder of two things:

One, that we need to stay on course. Hussein and his proxy Arafat are trying to distract us, extending a pattern of support that began during the last Gulf War and continued into 2001. Some current news about that alliance (London Telegraph, April 7, 2002) is even more disturbing, but it does illustrate why we mustn't take the bait. The harder we bite, the more "distractions" we can expect.

Unfortunately, most of our media commentators have all the discrimination of a Rock Bass. Drop something shiny in front of them, and they just can't help themselves. Most aren't ill-intentioned, it's just the nature of the beast in a world of 24 hour news and talking heads. Hence the Abdullah plan. Hence the coverage we see of Arafat.

Great leaders and good spokespeople understand the media has its job to do - and they have theirs. The distractions won't stop. So they ignore them, or make use of them, and move on with the real work at hand.

As Ken Adelman writes: "My longtime mentor, Donald Rumsfeld, is fond of saying: When a particular problem is intractable, enlarge it." Hussein is playing that game, but it's Rumsfeld's saying. Two can play that way. Two should.

Ajami's second key point is also worth remembering. While ugly incidents and racism are endemic throughout the Muslim world, it's also true that many Muslims are quietly cheering for us, hoping we'll win. The more we succeed, the more success we'll have as these folks start to feel brave enough to come out of the woodwork.

Do I really believe that? Yes, I do. I believe it because of the things we saw in the Eastern Bloc, both before and after. Regimes built on oppression and terror are inherently unstable. Those who also preach an ideology incompatible with what Orwell's 1984 called "the spirit of man" are twice vulnerable, and Islamist ideology these days qualifies in spades. We've seen the proof in Afghanistan. We can hear it even now if we listen in the right places. And we'll see it again tenfold in Iran.

To mix a couple of Bush Sr. quotes for a moment, "stay the course". Otherwise, those "thousand points of light" might not be the ones we want to see.