The friendly Saudis at ArabNews unleash a vitriolic blast at President Bush, and an appeal to US Democrats to keep “hammering home” the need for total surrender: Editorial: A Lost Opportunity.

It had seemed briefly that Bush was prepared to compromise. But the tone of his administration has not changed. This is a know-nothing, learn-nothing presidency as was once again made clear by the startling pronouncement of Homeland Security Adviser Frances Townsend. Ms. Townsend said that Iraq “remained a terrorist sanctuary” from which Al-Qaeda could plan attacks on the United States. The implication is that under Saddam’s rule, Bin Laden’s thugs were active throughout Iraq. Yet the whole world, with the exception of the Bush White House, now knows that the absolute opposite was true. Washington brought Al-Qaeda to Iraq and it is the Iraqis who are paying the price for this blunder.

Townsend also produced “declassified documents” that supposedly prove Bin Laden was urging the now-slain Al-Qaeda leader in Iraq to set up a terror cell in the United States. We can only be amazed at how Bin Laden imagined Zarqawi could find the time to organize such a thing in the midst of his activities in Iraq. The documents are either as inaccurate or phony as much of the so-called intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

The Bush White House continues to exist in a make-believe world. The hope here in the Middle East has been that the Democrats, seeing the error of their own original chauvinistic support for the invasion, would finally force an end to Bush’s folly. To have caved in because the president would not himself back down is tragic.

It does not matter that the Democrats do not have the numbers to overturn the veto. They owe it to US voters — who are heartily sick of the war — to keep hammering home the need for withdrawal. They also — though they probably do not consider this — owe it to the Iraqis to draw a line in the sand.

And while they encourage defeatism and Bush-hatred in the United States, in the religious apartheid kingdom they continue to arrest and persecute infidels who pollute their “holy” places: Saudis arrest Christian for entering Mecca.

Saudi officials have arrested a man in Mecca for being a Christian, saying that the city, which Muslims consider to be holy, is off-limits to non-Muslims.

Nirosh Kamanda, a Sri Lankan Christian, was detained by the Saudi Expatriates Monitoring Committee last week after he started to sell goods outside Mecca’s Great Mosque.

After running his fingerprints through a new security system, Saudi police discovered that he was a Christian who had arrived in the country six months earlier to take a job as a truck driver in the city of Dammam. Kamanda had subsequently left his place of work and moved to Mecca.

“The Grand Mosque and the holy city are forbidden to non-Muslims,” Col. Suhail Matrafi, head of the department of Expatriates Affairs in Mecca, told the Saudi daily Arab News. “The new fingerprints system is very helpful and will help us a lot to discover the identity of a lot of criminals,” he said.