There’s a ghost of a religion story in The New York Times‘ report on a North Korean arms deal with Ethiopia. The Times rightly focuses on the fact that the U.S. is winking at the violations of its own sanctions against N. Korea in order to see that its client state’s antique Soviet weapons are kept in working order, the better to bully Somalia’s Islamic fundamentalists. What’s not included in the story is the strange history of American Christian fundamentalists in the Horn of Africa, where they’ve backed first one dictator then the other in the thirty years of war between Somalia and Ethiopia, the Christian-dominated regional power.