Does Andrew Sullivan even try to write anymore? With a piece of slander against the "knee jerk left" that was so short, it could have been keyed in on his cell phone (less than 500 words), not only does he completely miss the point of Mary McGrory's comparison - i.e., that Saudi Arabia presents an equal if not greater threat to the United States of America than Iraq does right now - but he also misses the mark on most of his point-for-point debunking.

For example:

"Iraq is not a theocracy, as Saudi Arabia is. It's an ostensibly secular military police state, run by a single despot. Saudi Arabia, in contrast, is an oil-rich, religiously conservative theocratic oligarchy. However noxious both regimes are, it's indisputable that they are very different in their particulars."

Wrong on both counts, Andy. Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime may have started out on a more or lessly secular program, but Saddam has increasingly been playing to his own foaming-at-the-mouth religious right to shore up his regime. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is a MONARCHY, not an oligarchy, and uses horribly oppressive police state tactics to ensure the perpetuation of the now-shaky House of Saud. The theocratic oligarchs who terrorize the Saudis when the royal family's secret police aren't are just icing on the cake there.

And by the way, Iraq is also oil-rich. Now why would a conservative pundit forget to mention that, I wonder?

"Iraq has been developing weapons of mass destruction. Saudi Arabia hasn't, isn't and won't."

The majority of hijackers who transformed four American airliners into what many have called weapons of mass destruction were Saudis, not Iraqis. And thanks to our turning a blind eye to Saudi internal affairs, there is little if any guarantee that another crop of equally-demented zealots won't try to do something similar again. When's the last time that Iraqis killed nearly three thousand American citizens? They couldn't even pull that off during the Gulf War.

"Saddam has fought two disastrous wars against its neighbors, Iran and Kuwait. He invaded Kuwait and threatened to invade Saudi Arabia if the West hadn't stopped him. Saudi Arabia has never invaded another country."

People to the right of Mr. Sullivan have argued that Saudi Arabia, by encouraging the militant brand of Wahhabism that is indigenous there, is waging a de facto war on Western civilization. Whom has Iraq threatened of late?

"Iraq is in violation of umpteen U.N. resolutions. Saudi Arabia isn't."

Again, Mr. Sullivan might want to check a few facts before writing for a publication other than his blog. Resolution 1377 of the Security Council condemns those states which harbor and render financial assistance to agents of terror. Even the Rand Corp had a brief moment of clarity in seeing that Saudi-sponsored terrorism is perhaps the greatest evil we in the West face today.

See also various U.N. resolutions about the equality of women (most recently General Assembly Resolution 56/188), and the treatment of minorities, in particular the application of the death penalty for gays and lesbians.

Moreover, if we were to use the table of U.N. resolutions as a "hit list" for countries in need of immediate, violent regime change, when are we going after Ariel Sharon and the state of Israel?

"Iraq has gassed its own citizens and used chemical weapons in wartime. Saudi Arabia hasn't."

Iraq committed these offenses with our blessing at the time, Andy forgot to add. We provided logistical support and money to Saddam Hussein while he was employing chemical weapons both against the Iranians and his own rebellious citizens. Saudia Arabia may not have ever used weapons of mass destruction on its people, but by inflicting a misguided fundamentalist legal code upon them which features amputations for petty theft and capital punishment for adultery and same-sex relations, it has terrorized its citizenry no less than Saddam. Only last December fifteen girls were left to die in a burning school, because Saudi zealots would not permit male firefighters to be in the same room with them. How is that less evil than gassing them to death?

To his credit, at the end of his blog-McNugget of an article, Mr. Sullivan does acknowledge that Saudi Arabia might be part of the problem. But nevertheless his priorities and those of the war hawks (among them the present American administration) are completely out of whack. If as we're told every day by our leaders we are indeed fighting a "war on terrorism", then by any standard of measurement Saudi Arabia's corrupt monarchy and the fundamentalist terrorist breeding ground it provides and shelters should be in our crosshairs right now, not Iraq, whose links to terror are tenuous if not altogether nonexistent. Yet the drumbeat for war leads us inexplicably to Baghdad, to oust a tinpot dictator who no longer poses any credible military threat to his neighbors and whose much-touted plans to build weapons of mass destruction are fabricated out of evidence so flimsy that President Bush won't even let our own Senators see it.

Sloppy journalism, Mr. Sullivan. Go back to your blog. And shame on Salon for printing such obvious hack work.