General Petraeus, CNN reports, is warning that some Bible-thumping Florida church’s intention to burn the Koran next Saturday might endanger US troops.

The U.S. commander in Afghanistan on Monday criticized a Florida church’s plan to burn copies of the Quran on September 11, warning the demonstration “could cause significant problems” for American troops overseas.

“It could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort in Afghanistan,” Gen. David Petraeus said in a statement issued Monday.

The Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, plans to mark the anniversary of al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington by burning copies of the Muslim holy book. The church insists the event is “neither an act of love nor of hate,” but a warning against what it calls the threats posed by Islam.

The event has drawn criticism from Muslims in the United States and overseas, with thousands of Indonesians gathering outside the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, on Sunday to protest the planned Quran burning.

“The burning is not only an insult to the holy Quran, but an insult to Islam and Muslims around the world,” said Muhammad Ismail, a spokesman for the hard-line Indonesian Muslim group Hizb ut-Tahrir.

With about 120,000 U.S. and NATO-led troops still battling al Qaeda and its allies in the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban movement, Petraeus warned that burning Qurans “is precisely the kind of action the Taliban uses and could cause significant problems — not just here, but everywhere in the world we are engaged with the Islamic community.”

Can one begin to imagine General McArthur warning Americans against burning the Rising Sun flag during WWII, or General Patton advising a news organization that a symbolic burning of Mein Kampf might inflame Waffen SS units?

If you’re scared of the camel-fornicating sons of the Prophet, you shouldn’t be in the US military in time of war.

Frankly, I think instead of these endless exercises in cultural sensitivity and attempts to placate the religious bigotry of the Saracens, we ought to issue US troops bathroom tissue imprinted with the Koran and burn the Koran daily as part of routine latrine maintenance.

We’re at war with militant Islam. Islamic intolerance and insolent demands for deference to their superstition are the hallmarks of the ideology which produced the September 11th attacks on the United States. The Koran and the Prophet Mohammed are Islamicist symbols in very much the same way the meatball flag, the swastika, and pictures of Adolph Hitler were intrinsic to the ideology of our enemies in WWII.

Trying to fight a war, while supporting your enemies’ proposal to build a combined recruiting center and victory monument in the vicinity of their surprise attack, and while insisting on reverential treatment of their symbols, is nothing short of ridiculous.

All this shows that liberalism is so thoroughly decadent, so utterly bound up in namby pamby inhibitions against conflict and animosity, that liberals are basically incapable of making war. The liberal consciousness requires military action inevitably to be accompanied by simultaneous appeasement, and prohibits a genuine commitment to defeating the enemy out of self-defeating fears of antagonizing anyone. All liberal wars are Korea and Vietnam. They all have to end either in concession and withdrawal or in stalemate. For liberals, appeasement is always a substitute for victory.

I didn’t originally think much of that silly Florida church’s Koran-burning demonstration, but I’ve changed my mind. I plan to look for my own copy and take it out and light it up on Saturday, too, just to affirm a general policy of Americans declining to placate hirsute barbarians afflicted with superstitious extremism. If that makes the Taliban angry, that is just too bad.