FROM THE OPINION PAGEN A MOVE straight out of a “Saturday Night Live” skit, the Department of Defense on Monday announced it was upset with politically incorrect graffiti scribbled on one of the bombs dropped on Iraq last week.

Pentagon officials saw an Associated Press photo taken during the four-day bombing campaign that showed a 2000-pound laser-guided bomb on the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise in the Persian Gulf with an inscription that said, “Here’s a Ramadan present from Chad Rickenberg.”

The Clinton administration was not amused at this breach of bombing etiquette. “Department of Defense officials were distressed to learn of thoughtless graffiti mentioning the holy month of Ramadan written on a piece of U.S. ordnance during Operation Desert Fox” in Iraq, chief Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said in a statement Monday. “Religious intolerance is an anathema to Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen and to all Americans who cherish the right to worship freely,” he added. “The United States deeply respects Islam.”

Imagine the nerve of some sailor insulting Moslems right before they’re bombed, maimed and killed. It is irrelevant whether the victims could read the graffiti as the bombs plummeted toward their homes. Clearly what counts is the expression of the offending thought, not the fact that people are being blown to smithereens.

Although the Geneva Convention is silent on this matter, we salute the Pentagon for insisting on politically correct bombings. We suggest in the future that all U.S. armed forces paint yellow smiley faces on all ordnance and adopt as its official wartime slogan: It’s not personal, it’s just business.”

  IT SEEMS THAT QUITE A LOT OF NORMAL FOLKS around the world, even the normally less-than-courageous members of the American journaille, shared this Website’s abhorrence of the 20th century’s eagerness to use high explosives against innocent civilians as a means of solving political or economic disputes.