by JAMES TARANTO
Wednesday, August 24, 2005 1:14 P.M. EDT

Gail Collins Is Unsettled
Yesterday the New York Times published an editorial bemoaning, as the headline put it, "Iraq's Unsettling Constitution":

The draft constitution given to Iraq's national assembly last night does little to advance the prospects for a unified and peaceful Iraq. Nor does it reflect well on the Bush administration, which let its politically motivated obsession with an arbitrary deadline trump its responsibility to promote inclusiveness, women's rights and the rule of law.

The Times complains of "divisive provisions, like the enshrinement of Islamic law and the threats to women's family and property rights." Blogger "Alenda Lux" offers some perspective. Here's a quote from the constitution:

The religion of the state . . . is the sacred religion of Islam. Followers of other religions are free to exercise their faith and perform their religious rites within the limits of the provisions of law. . . . No law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.

Unsettling? Not according to the New York Times. For this quote is from the Afghan constitution, not the Iraqi one--and when Afghanistan approved its constitution, the Times was exultant, seeing it as a triumph of, as a Jan. 6, 2004, editorial's headline put it, "Islamic Democracy":

Afghanistan's new Constitution offers hope that the beleaguered nation can finally evolve into a modern, democratic state. . . . And it balances the goal of an Islamic state with the promise to abide by the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. America's ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, was right to call it "one of the most enlightened constitutions in the Islamic world."

The Times observes that the Afghan constitution "specifically grants equal rights to women, even promising two Parliament seats in each province to women." The Iraqi constitution (excerpts here and here) has similar provisions:

Iraqis are equal before the law without discrimination because of gender, ethnicity, nationality, origin, color, religion, sect, belief, opinion or social or economic status. . . . No less than 25% of Council of Deputies seats go to women.

But these provisions go totally unmentioned in the Times' hand-wringing editorial.

What's going on here? Well, it should be obvious, but in case it isn't, the Times makes it clear with the conclusion of its unsettled Iraq editorial:

Americans continue dying in Iraq, but their mission creeps steadily downward. The nonexistent weapons of mass destruction dropped out of the picture long ago. Now the United States seems ready to walk away from its fine words about helping the Iraqis create a beacon of freedom, harmony and democracy for the Middle East. All that remains to be seen is whether the White House has become so desperate for an excuse to declare victory that it will settle for an Iranian-style Shiite theocracy.

Gail Collins & Co. are heavily invested in the idea that America shouldn't have liberated in Iraq in the first place. Failure in Iraq--unlike in Afghanistan--would vindicate them, and that is why they are so eager to find signs of it. What really unsettles America's defeatists is the prospect of success.

'Another Man' Is Cindy Sheehan
"One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," Reuters' Stephen Jukes famously said after 9/11. Now we know who "another man" is: Cindy Sheehan. WorldNetDaily points to a Sheehanoia video (it's very long, well over 60 megabytes) that includes (starting at 5:36) this exchange with CBS News's Mark Knoller:

Knoller: You know that the president says Iraq is the central front in the war on terrorism. Don't you believe that?

Sheehan: No, because it's not true. You know Iraq was no threat to the United States of America until we invaded. I mean they're not even a threat to the United States of America. Iraq was not involved in 9/11, Iraq was not a terrorist state. But now that we have decimated the country, the borders are open, freedom fighters from other countries are going in, and they have created more terrorism by going to an Islamic country, devastating the country, and killing innocent people in that country. The terrorism is growing and people who never thought of being car bombers or suicide bombers are now doing it because they want the United States of America out of their country.

"The terrorism is growing," therefore Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism? The illogic here seems obvious. But note her reference to "freedom fighters from other countries." She's not talking about Iraq's indigenous paramilitary death squads but about terrorists who are coming from places like Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria for the purpose of murdering Iraqis and Americans. To the Sheehanoids, these are "freedom fighters."

What Would All Do Without Bush?
"Bush: Antiwar Mom Doesn't Speak for All"--headline, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Aug. 24

Comfortably Numb?
There's a controversy brewing over when human beings develop the capacity to feel pain. Of course this is driven by abortion politics. Some legislators have proposed regulations that would, as the New York Times explains, "compel doctors to tell women having abortions at 20 weeks or later that their fetuses can feel pain and to offer them anesthesia specifically for the fetus."

Now the Journal of the American Medical Association has published a meta-analysis that finds "nerve connections in the brain are unlikely to have developed enough for the fetus to feel pain before 29 weeks." Other scientists disagree, and David Grimes, a physician who formerly headed "abortion surveillance" for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says, "This is an unknowable question."

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that because a fetus does not have the same cerebral structure as an adult, he has no capacity to feel pain. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, which is to say that a developing organism goes through stages analogous to those of the process of evolution. It may be that earlier-stage fetuses have the capacity to feel pain through some more primitive, temporary nerve connections. To deny this out of hand would be about as scientific as to assert that God created man out of whole cloth.

A couple of other tidbits illuminate the Times' bias on the abortion question:

• "About 1.3 million abortions a year are performed in the United States, 1.4 percent of them at 21 weeks or later." Why a number first, then a percentage? Perhaps because the thought of 18,200 late-term abortions a year is discomfiting even to those who do not favor a complete ban on abortion.
  
  
• "Advocates for abortion rights say the real purpose of the [fetal pain] measures is to discourage women from seeking abortions." Interestingly, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports that NARAL Pro-Choice America does not object to the proposed law. But if other groups oppose measures to discourage women from seeking abortions, shouldn't they be called "advocates for abortion" rather than "advocates for abortion rights"?

The Associated Press report on the study quotes Kanwaljeet Anand, a fetal pain researcher who disagrees with the conclusion, and who says of the meta-analysts: "They have literally stuck their hands into a hornet's nest." Fetal researchers may literally stick their hands into some unusual places, but we're willing to bet a hornet's nest isn't among them.

What Did the Control Group Get?
"Study: Placebos Make People Feel Better"--headline, Associated Press, Aug. 24

Misattributions of American History
We got lots of interesting responses to our item Friday seeking examples of events or initiatives that are commonly attributed to the wrong presidential administration. Our examples were the Ruby Ridge killings (attributed to Clinton, but actually happened under Bush père), the 55 mph speed limit (attributed to Carter, actually instituted under Nixon) and draft registration (attributed to Reagan, actually reinstituted under Carter).

We didn't get any that fit the category as well as did our initial examples, but here are the ones that came closest:

• The JFK tax cuts. These were actually enacted in 1964, when LBJ was president, though it's true that JFK proposed them in 1962. LBJ does usually get credit for another piece of legislation JFK originally proposed: the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
  
  
• Vietnam. "I stood up and fought against Richard Nixon's war in Vietnam," declared John Kerry*, who by the way served in Vietnam, during a primary debate last year. In fact, as this timeline shows, America's involvement in Vietnam dated back to the Truman administration, which sent aid to France and military advisers to Vietnam during what was then called the Indochina War. If Vietnam is to be laid at the feet of one president, though, surely it must be LBJ, who presided over the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which escalated the conflict. Incidentally, Kerry also claimed that Nixon had been president when Kerry went to Cambodia in December 1968, which in fact the inauguration was not until the following month. But since the Cambodia tale turned out to be either a fiction or a hallucination, it's hard to know whether this belongs on the list.
  
  
• Gasoline price decontrol. "The last time we had price controls on gasoline, we had long lines of cars at filling stations, these lines sometimes stretching around the block, with motorists sitting in those lines for hours," Thomas Sowell wrote the other day. "That nonsense ended almost overnight when President Ronald Reagan, ignoring the cries of liberal politicians and the liberal media, got rid of price controls with a stroke of the pen." It's true that Reagan ended gasoline price controls with the stroke of a pen, on Jan. 28, 1981--but decontrol had begun in April 1979, under Carter, and was scheduled to be complete in September 1981. Reagan merely accelerated the process by eight months.

In all these cases, the president to whom the action is attributed does bear some responsibility--especially the first, since JFK really was the driving force behind the posthumous tax cuts. Also in the first two cases, the choice of attribution seems motivated by partisanship rather than ignorance. Since Americans are more fond of JFK than LBJ, he makes a more appealing symbol for today's tax-cutters. And since Democrats still revile Nixon, blaming him for LBJ's war is a good way to score points with primary votes.

A slight clarification of our Friday item: Although conscription ended in 1973, as we said, draft registration continued until 1974.

* The haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat, who by the way promised 206 days ago to release his military records.

Tokyo Shopping District Devastated!
"Japanese House-Sitter Robot Hits Stores"--headline, Associated Press, Aug. 23

What Would Obese Football Players Face Without Experts?
"Obese Football Players Face Trouble, Experts Say"--headline, Reuters, Aug. 23

Sounds Like a Fun Group
"Group Ensures Global Population Growth"--headline, Associated Press, Aug. 23

Remember When They Used to Call Us 'Men'?
"Reality Show for Sperm Donors"--headline, CNN.com, Aug. 24

Unsafe Synonymy
Yesterday we noted that more than 1 in 8 girls at Canton, Ohio's Timken high school are pregnant, and school authorities are mystified as to how this came to be. It turns out that the Timken mascot is the Trojan, so perhaps this caused the girls to misunderstood their sex-ed lessons about how to avoid pregnancy.

Another Reason to Hate Metric Football
"A third-division provincial girls football [sic] team entered the annals of Belgian soccer on Saturday after suffering a crushing 50-1 defeat because of the absence of a single but crucial player: their music-loving goalkeeper," Agence France-Presse reports from Brussels.

The goalie skipped the game for a rock concert. Yet the team, which goes by the catchy name SK Berlaar, hopes to win the game anyway:

SK Berlaar's secretary, Jan Verbinnen, was unmoved by the loss and saw a way of inverting the outcome, noting that the other team had registered 16 instead of 15 players for the match.

"If I tell the Federation, they will have lost the match 5-0 and will be eliminated from the championships," he told the newspaper.

Finally, a soccer story so ridiculous that no one will e-mail us to defend this preposterous "sport"!

(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Lawrence Peck, Chris Stetsko, Mordecai Bobrowsky, Aaron Cummins, Reid Matthews, Ethel Fenig, Mark Van Der Molen, Michael Segal, Jim Kirkwood, C.E. Dobkin, Paul Dyck, Barak Moore, Ruth Papazian, Julie Beck, Gil Student, John Wohlstetter, Jim Spilman, Greg Askins, Dave Vasquez, Harry Koza, Terry Bailey, Robert Lafferty, Rick Wahler, Jim Fulbrook, Matt Jordan, Thomas Crimmins, Bob Coyne, Randy Rowell, Charles Gibson, Burt Jennings, David Lunde, Greg Rice, Barry Annis, Craig Limesand, Dave Casper, Michael Gill, Tom Burson, Les Miller, Allan Zimmerman, Greg Renaud, Doug Dreyden, Fritz von Carp, Timothy Morrill, Bob Lobis, James Becker, Richard Rider, Rob Bogin, Kurt Vogel, Matt Kaufman, William Knecht, Don Bosch, Don Hubschman, Thomas Dillon, David Gutierrez, Tom Czech and Christopher Coleman. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

Today on OpinionJournal:

• Bret Stephens and Joseph Rago: A reassuring portrait of America's Muslims.
• Manuel Miranda: A reassuring portrait of America's Muslims
• Claudia Rosett: John Bolton has a chance to be the U.N.'s Eliot Ness.
• John Barnes: An American in Paris sees the sights of its liberation.