It would be nice to go fishing.

It would be nice to worry about John Roberts.

It would be really nice to think Karl Rove was worth worrying about.

But something wholly distracting is going on. Must be that war on whatever it is, and its very real casualties.

Barbecues smoke, kids come home from summer camp and ballplayers get busted for steroids. Life goes on.

But does it really? I wondered this recently, as my laptop was profiled (or not) in an examination at an airport security checkpoint. Watching the guard wave a practically magic wand over every angle and face of the thing, it struck me that here we are, Americans in high summer, at the dawnish of the 21st century. We may be citizens of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, but our liberty has shrunk under measures we take to ward off Islamic terror attacks, and our dedication to equality looks tatty as we go about making the world safe for ... sharia.

It sounds crazy, but this is reality. Monday, Aug. 15, promises to be a great day for sharia, or Islamic law. It marks the end of the constitutional wrangling in Iraq and the beginning of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and parts of the West Bank. Both events -- fought for, facilitated, even micromanaged by the U.S. of A. -- should expand the domain of Islamic law, which codifies female inferiority and religious inequality. I don't know a better way to quantify the two events. By day's end, Iraq, if it settles as expected on a draft constitution based in sharia, and Gaza, as a new sector of the already sharia-vested Palestinian Authority, will have joined the community of nations at odds with the Free World.

That sounds crazy, too. But no more so than the thought of American troops fighting off Iranian-supported death squads to shore up a government led by a possible Iranian agent -- Ibrahim Jaafari, the Iraqi prime minister and leader of the Tehran-allied Dawa faction. It sounds fantastic, but the notion comes from the serious-minded Caroline Glick of The Jerusalem Post, who recently wrote: "Both U.S. and Iraqi officials -- Shi'ite and Sunni -- have since the inauguration of the Iraqi Governing Council in the summer of 2003 stated repeatedly and matter-of-factly that he (Mr. Jaafari) is an Iranian agent." Mr. Jaafari spent years under Iranian protection during Saddam's regime; he also just concluded a three-day visit to Tehran where he sealed oil, military and tourism deals. I don't recall hearing any word on ending Iran's recognized sponsorship of terror and unrest in Iraq. Continued...