Man Bites Dog: The Axis of Evil takes on canines.

If a race of super-intelligent dogs were to land their spaceships on Earth, we would not have a hard time convincing them to join the U.S. in the "War on Terror." They wouldn't even need to see that infamous al-Qaeda tape of the dog being gassed to realize that the enemies of America are the enemies of all dogkind. Indeed, as it turns out, our Axis of Evil and theirs are not all that different.

"I call on the judiciary to arrest all long-legged, medium-legged, and short-legged dogs along with their long-legged owners," Gholamreza Hassani told worshippers last month, according to an Iranian newspaper, "otherwise I'll do it myself." This Iranian cleric is hardly a maverick; he is merely one of the more outspoken members of perhaps the most anti-canine regime in the world. Iranian officials regularly confiscate dogs and execute them unless the owners can provide adequate paperwork; even then the animals are often beaten and abused, and sometimes put to death anyway. In June, the sale of dogs was banned.

The rationale behind the periodic crackdowns is twofold. First, Islam is, quite simply, anti-dog. While the Koran makes few references to dogs, the Hadith -- the collection of sayings of Muhammad's contemporaries and closest followers that forms the spine of Islamic law -- contains over 400 references to dogs, almost all of them derogatory. Dogs are simply "unclean"; according to one widely cited hadith, angels cannot, or will not, enter a home that contains a dog. Dogs used for hunting or guarding are marginally okay, but even they are seen as spiritually dirty -- the equivalent of useful pigs. (One hadith holds that if your guard dog licks a utensil in your home, you must wash it seven times and -- inconveniently, it would seem, wash it an eighth time with dirt.) It is illegal to bring a dog into Saudi Arabia unless it has been certified as a seeing-eye, hunting, or guard dog. Even in secular Iraq, Saddam Hussein first made a name for himself as a boy by torturing and killing dogs with a white-hot steel bar.

The second reason Iran and other Islamic countries tend to crack down periodically on dog ownership is that it's perceived as a form of Westernization. "Regarding the spread of decadent Western culture in the society, the police have risen up against the propagators of corruption," read a police declaration in the Iran Daily newspaper, according to the New York Times. Other targets of the crackdown: women wearing heavy makeup and shopkeepers who dress up their window mannequins in saucy poses. "Sometimes they go after satellite dishes, sometimes they go after the way women are dressed on the street, and sometimes they go after dogs," Artin Zaman, one of the founders of the Iranian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, told the Times. "It's a way of keeping people distracted so they don't think about bigger problems."

But there's a larger dynamic at work here: The practice of keeping pooches is, today, a key indicator of Westernization. Perhaps the best illustration of this phenomenon is in East Asia. In 2001, during the run-up to the soccer World Cup in Seoul, South ...