BONNIE ERBE Don't use prison scandal to attack military women

When first lady Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, the second president of our fair nation, John Adams, and said, "Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors," I don't think she had the abuse pictures from Abu Ghraib prison in mind.
Nonetheless, contemporary Americans who cling tenaciously to Abigail Adams' vision of "ladies" as white-wigged, sewing-circle types who churn their own butter and bear children in mangers without benefit of anesthesia are as much out of touch with today's female as she would be.
Yes, it's the first time in recorded history we've seen digital images of women delving apparently zealously into sexual abuse in a military context. No, we should not be surprised, shocked or taken aback.
Nor should we be fooled by those who use these women's obvious mistakes to push their own predetermined agendas. Most critics of the female participants in Abu Ghraib torture and sexual abuse were adamantly opposed to women's advancement way before these pictures were digitally trajected 'round the world. To call the prison abuse scandal a natural result of sexual tension between male and female service personnel in today's sexually integrated service is like calling peace a natural result of war.
Yes, the latter precedes the former. But that doesn't mean the latter created the former.
Women followed orders
Anyone so remotely disconnected from the times that he/she believes 21-year-old Pfc. Lynndie England and 26-year-old Spc. Sabrina D. Harman were doing anything but trying to go along, get along and follow orders, is naive beyond the point of credulity. Anyone who expects better of women than of men in such revolting, attitude-altering circumstances (wartime prison guard duty) is smoking something of hallucinatory caliber.
As England reasserted last weekend in her first broadcast interview, she was following orders. Hate her for that, if you must, but not for being a females who was following orders. We should all know by now that men and women are different, but not better or worse than each other.
Anyone who fails to believe the New Yorker magazine report (that orders to "Grab who you must. Do what you want," at Abu Ghraib were known to the president and given by the defense secretary) is clearly predisposed to singling out and blaming the women perp's (i.e., perpetrators). Yes, many women are less violent than most men. Some are more sedate and, well, more civilized than many man. Parents see play differences emerging early between most girls and most boys. Beyond that, "xx" or "xy" generalizations are useless and counterproductive. There are many women who are just as tough as if not tougher than most men. Remember, some 30 percent of male inductees fail military physicals. The percentage of women who fail is much higher, but it's hardly a given for all men.
In defense of Karpinski
Shame on those who ridicule Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, the Army reserve officer put in charge of military prisons in Iraq last June, and caterwauling that she was not up to the job. How dare they postulate she willingly, knowingly, presided over the torture and abuse? She's since made clear she fought other officers for control. That control was finally wrested away from her and given instead to "military intelligence" officers.
The Boston Globe this weekend reported that "advocates for expanding opportunities for women soldiers fear a backlash to the crisis could slow or even stop the steady advancement of women into combat support roles and leadership positions since the 1991 Gulf War."
It didn't take long for the anti-women women to sound the bugle and start playing taps for women in the military. There will always be that kind. But women are too strong and too entrenched (comprising about 15 percent of the active-duty military, 24 percent of reservists and one in seven soldiers in Iraq) to surrender.
X Bonnie Erbe, host of the PBS program "To the Contrary," writes this column for Scripps Howard News Service.