Mother Of All Blunders

Those ramifications include women's unequal vulnerability to rape and injury, as well as cultural attitudes toward women that may enhance their exposure to punishment or, alternatively, make them useful to our enemies.

Iran wasted no time dressing up Turney in Muslim garb and parading her before television cameras. More than her fellow male captives, Turney was required to confess repeatedly, to apologize for trespassing in Iranian waters and to write letters of contrition.

This was not, needless to say, Churchill's navy.

Rape, though not a likely risk in this case, is a consistent argument against putting women in or near combat. While advocates for women in combat argue that men are also raped, there is an important difference. Women are raped by men, which, given the inherent power differential between the sexes, raises women's rape to another level of terror.

What kind of man, one shudders to wonder, is willing to allow his country's women to be raped and tortured by men of enemy nations? None that I know, but our military is gradually weaning men of their intuitive inclination to protect women -- which, by extrapolation, means ignoring the screams of women being assaulted.

At the point when our men can stand by unfazed while American servicewomen are raped and tortured, then we will have no cause to fight any war. We will have already lost.

Positioning women to become pawns of propaganda, meanwhile, is called aiding and abetting the enemy.

kparker@kparker.com