When a pretender to sanity like Ahmadinejad gets to lecture the West about how it treats its women, we've effectively handed him a free pass to the end zone and made the world his cheerleaders.

Not only does the Iranian president get to look magnanimous in releasing the hostages, but he gets to look wise. We in the West get to look humiliated, foolish and weak.

We can debate whether they're right until all our boys wear aprons, but it won't change the way we're perceived. The propaganda value Iran gained from its lone female hostage, the mother of a 3-year-old, was incalculable.

There's not enough space here to go into all the ways this is true, but children (and good parents) know the difference even if some adults are too dim, brainwashed or ideologically driven to see what's obvious.

It should be unnecessary to say the military isn't a proper vehicle for social experimentation, but a machine dedicated to fighting and, if necessary, killing.

Meanwhile, no one can look at photos of the 15 British marines and sailors and argue convincingly the British Navy is stronger for the presence of Leading Seaman Faye Turney - no matter how lovely and brave she might be.

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 Islamic 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 write letters of contrition.

While advocates for women in combat argue men also are 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.

None that I know, but our military gradually is 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, we'll have no cause to fight any war. We already will have lost.

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