The Pentagon, a.k.a. the International Trust for Historic Preservation, has once more shown the world its deep cultural sensitivity.

Franklin Graham, the Christian evangelist who has branded Islam a "very wicked and evil" religion, was the honored speaker at the Pentagon's Good Friday service.

After a Christian singer crooned, "There is one God and one faith," Graham told an auditorium of soldiers in camouflage, civilian staffers and his son, a West Point cadet: "There's no other way to God except through Christ. ... Jesus Christ is alive because he is risen, and friends, he's coming back, and I believe he's coming back soon."

When Muslim groups complained that the Pentagon was "endorsing" his attacks on Islam, Graham asked for a photo op with Muslim Pentagon employees. They declined.

Muslims suspicious that America is on a crusade against Islam were inflamed to learn that Graham is taking his missionary act to Iraq. They are still scorched by his remarks to NBC News after 9/11: "It wasn't Methodists flying into those buildings, and it wasn't Lutherans. It was an attack on this country by people of the Islamic faith."

He wrote in his last book that Christianity and Islam were "as different as lightness and darkness," and recently told the Sunday Times of London, "The true God is the God of the Bible, not the Quran."

Workers from Graham's Christian relief organization, Samaritan's Purse, were in Jordan, waiting to inveigle Iraqi infidels with a blend of kitchen pantry and Elmer Gantry.

Treating Operation Iraqi Freedom as a lucky break for Jesus, Graham told the religious Web site Beliefnet: "We are there to reach out to love them and to save them, and as a Christian I do this in the name of Jesus Christ."

The 50-year-old son of Billy Graham has close connections to the president, who was in charge of evangelical outreach during his father's '88 campaign and who pressed war in Iraq by calling liberty "God's gift to humanity."

Both scions "recommitted" to Jesus Christ after periods of rebellion. Franklin Graham gave the prayer at W.'s inaugural. The president said Billy Graham "planted a seed in my heart" to stop drinking and embrace Jesus.

In Baghdad, it was Bad Friday. On the Islamic holy day, thousands of Iraqis marched through downtown, shouting for America to "leave our country." Looters, continuing their rampage, stole vials of polio virus from a public health laboratory and set the Information Ministry on fire.

Mullahs were happy to talk -- and balk -- after suffocating under Saddam.

"You are masters today," Sheik Ahmed al-Kubeisy lectured America in one Baghdad mosque. "But I warn you against thinking of staying. Get out before we force you out." (Isn't this how Osama got started?)

Back here, the neo-cons and war planners were too busy gloating to worry about the ambient sound of civilizations clashing.

Rummy, once a Bechtel Iraqi pipeline booster and now busy planning to load U.S. military bases into Iraq, seemed almost perversely determined to act as though the vandalizing of relics of the birth of civilization was insignificant, something only sissies could cry over.

The Pentagon could easily have saved the national museum and library if they had redeployed the U.S. troops assigned to guard Ahmad Chalabi, the Richard Perle pal, Pentagon candidate and convicted embezzler who is back in Iraq trying to ingratiate himself with the country he left 40 years ago.

Instead of hectoring those who expressed any doubt about the difficulty of occupying Iraq, the conservatives should worry about their own self-parody: pandering to the base by blessing evangelical Christians who want to proselytize Muslims; protecting their interests by backing a shady expat puppet; pleasing their contributors by pre-emptively awarding rebuilding contracts to Halliburton and Bechtel; and swaggering like Goths as Iraq's cultural heritage goes up in flames.

Talk about a baptism by fire.

Maureen Dowd writes for The New York Times