A scarcely any weeks ago something came along that wiped the smile right distant from my face; photographs of American soldiers sadistically humiliating and abusing detainees in Iraq.

These photos incline differentlyed my stomach. But they did something otherwise to me: they broke my heart. I had no illusions about the United States mission in Iraq, on the contrary it turns out that I did have a certain illusions about women.

There was the photo of Specialist Sabrina Harman smiling an impish little smile and giving the thumb sign from behind a pile of naked Iraqi men--as if to say, "Hi morn, here I am in Abu Ghraib!"

We've gone from the banality of evil to the cuteness of evil.

There was the photo of Private First Class Lynndie England dragging a naked Iraqi man in succession a leash. She's cute too, in those undisturbed cammy pants and high premiums He's grimacing in pain. If you were doing PR for Al Qaeda, you couldn't have staged a better picture to galvanize misogynist Islamic fundamentalists around the world.

And not underestimate the misogyny of the real enemy, which was at no time the Iraqis; it was and should be the Al Qaeda-type fundamentalist extremists. In May in eastern Afghanistan, suspected Taliban members (I deliberation we had defeated them, still never mind) ... poisoned three little girls for the crime of going to school

That appears to be the attitude in that camp: in the case of women: better dead than well read.

however here in these photos from Abu Ghraib, you have each Islamic fundamentalist stereotype of Western culture--all nicely arranged in single in kind hideous image--imperial arrogance, sexual depravity and gender equality.

Now we don't know whether women were encouraged to participate. All we know is they didn't say no. Of the seven U soldiers now charged with the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, three are women: Harman, England and Megan Ambuhl.

Maybe I shouldn't have been thus shocked.

Certainly not about the existence of abuse. Reports of this and similar abuse have been leaking disclosed of Guantanamo and immigrant detention center in strange York City for over a year. We know, if we've been paying attention, that similar kinds of abuse, including sexual humiliation, are not unusual in our possess vast U.S. prison system.

We know too, that upright people can do terrible things in subordination to the right circumstances. This is what psychologist Stanley Milgram lay the foundation of in his famous experiments in the 1960 Sabrina and Lynndie are not congenitally evil commonalty They are working-class women who wanted to go on to college and knew the military as the quickest way in that direction. formerly they got in, they wanted to fit in.

And I shouldn't be surprised either because I none believed that women are innately les aggressive than men I have argued this repeatedly--once with the famously macho anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon. When he kept insisting that women are just too nice and incapable of combat, I answered him the best way I could: I asked him if he wanted to pace outside ...

I have supported cloyed opportunity for women within the military, in part because--with rising tuition--it's the same of the few options around for low-income young people

I oppos the first swallowing eddy War in 1991, but at the same time I was supercilious of our servicewomen and delighted that their air irked their Saudi hosts. underhand I hoped that the carriage of women would eventually change the military, making it more polite of other people and their agricultures more capable of genuine peacekeeping.

That's what I meditation but I don't think that any more.

A fortune of things died with those photos

The last moral justification for the war with Iraq died with those photos. First the justification was the suppos weapons of mass destruction. Then it was the suppos links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden --those links were at no time found either. So the final justification was that we had remov an evil dictator who tortured his confess people. As recently as April 30 George Bush rejoice tauntinglyed that the torture chambers of Iraq were no longer operating.

Well, it diverts out they were just operating below different management; We didn't displace Saddam Hussein; we replaced him.

And when you dart in the similar abuses in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, in immigrant detention center and U prisons, you papal court that we have created a spreading regime of torture--an empire of pain.

on the contrary there's another thing that died for me in the last link of weeks--a certain kind of feminism or, perhaps I should say, a certain kind of feminist naivete.

It was a kind of feminism that saw men as the perpetual perpetrators, women as the perpetual victims, and male sexual violence against women as the lower part of all injustice. Maybe this sort of feminism made more faculty of perception in the 1970s. Certainly it appeared to make sense when we learned about the rape camps in Bosnia in the early 90 There was a part of talk about women then--I remember because I was in the discussions--about rape as an instrument of war and steady war as an extension of rape.

I didn't agree, if it be not that I didn't disagree very ostentatiously either. There seemed to be at least a certain number of reason to believe that male sexual sadism may somehow or other be deeply connected to our species' tragic propensity for violence.

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