our Serbia and Iraq interventions is that in the first we didn't invade, depose the government and disband the military. We, along with many other concerned nations, intervened in a fairly narrowly focused humanitarian way. In Iraq we did all of the above with chaos as the predictable result. Hitchens makes a pretty good argument for our military intervention in the former Yugoslavia, but his mistake is to try to see the Iraq debacle in the same light.

The various rationales advanced by the Bush Administration for invading Iraq and deposing Saddam, even if based on facts (which several were not), articulate a policy that surely no one believes in. Possession of WMDs, a brutal dictator, possible support for terrorists, a proven threat to its neighbors aptly describe the leadership of so many countries as to make it obvious that they cannot form the basis of our foreign policy. If they did, we would be at war with China and Pakistan and countless other less powerful states. The arguement falls of its own weight.

Use of military power for humanitarian reasons can be justified and can even work in certain very specific situations. Iraq was not one of them, but Sudan may well be. There are others, but it takes an administration with a much finer understanding of history, geography, religion and the specifics of each situation than the clowns leading Bush by the nose.

War means a lot of men, and women, get killed. If mass rape justifies war, then doesn't that kind of say female feelings are worth more than male lives?

As bad as rape is, it isn't fatal in and of itself. It's not the same as being killed.

It makes me really mad when people with political goals try to agitate and make people equate rape with murder. For example, recent efforts to get rid of the statute of limitations for rape. A law like that would effectively equate rape with murder.

When you equate rape with murder, then you in a backhanded way end up supporting the idea that rape is a lifelong stigma that a woman can never erase from her person.

Rape causes PTSD. People can heal from PTSD -- when they make an effort to heal, that is.

If we go out of our way to equate rape with murder, then that might discourage rape survivors from TRYING to heal their PTSD.

War involves killing, and people can't heal from being dead, no matter how hard they try.

So I would say that rape is not a reason to go to war.

And by the way -- we didn't intervene in former Yugoslavia to stop rape. We intervened to stop murder.

And the murders came about because the USSR imploded, something we'd wished would happen, and something we committed many sins in the name of helping to happen.

So the whole history of the Cold War gave us a moral mandate to intervene, quite aside from any feminist concerns.

Some things always escape mention whenever our excursion into the Balkans is celebrated, usually by someone with a longing to bring back the Clinton era in the person of our former First Lady.

One is the depleted uranium that we dumped all over the region in our bombing campaign, which killed and maimed many of the women and children whose salvation is celebrated. Of those left, a significant number can expect to develop cancer ten to twenty years from now (twenty to thirty years from the time of the original bombing). This is the same weapon that is now being used in Iraq.

Forgotten as well is that Serbia has a stronger historic right to Kosovo than Israel does to Palestine, having lost the region in battle some three hundred years after the Jews decamped to Europe. If you support Israel's reinvasion of the midEast, why not Serbia's in eastern Europe? Because Serbia was headed by a tyrant? I don't remember anyone accusing Menachim Begin, the inventor of modern terrorism, of being a nice guy either.

This is important because of the change in goverrnment I hope we're about to see. There is a certain nostalgia for the immediate past, understandable considering what we've been through, but very dangerous. As we have to move beyond Rumsfeld and Cheney, we need to do better than Madeleine Albright and William Cohen, both campaigning for a top spot in any new administration. Don't forget, these were the people who celebrated their victory in eastern Europe by advocating the invasion of Iraq in the late 90s, as the Clintons cheered them on.

Is our humanitarian impulse dwarfed by our distrust of all neocon adventures, as the right-wing complains? Why did one intervention have so much more feminist support than another?

The intervention in Bosnia was just that, an intervention. There was need for rescuing of innocents. And many innocents were rescued. There was never really any question whether this adventure was worthwhile or not.

The "intervention" in Iraq is full of lies and cheating and false motivations. It is full of torture and wasted lives and needless slaughter. It is full of shame and international condemnation and loss of face. Only someone who has a distorted view of the world could view this adventure as worthwhile.

That all having been said, not even the worst incompetent criminal liar is wrong 100% of the time. So the fact that there is some good coming from the illegal invasion of is not surprising. And it is OK to be happy about that good.

Being happy about one consequence of this misadventure does not make it any less wrong. That is the key issue.

Be happy fewer women are being systematically raped. But don't let that keep you from being unhappy about the overwhelmingly large number of ways this war is a disaster.

Rape is a horrible and inexcusable act which in itself is not an act of murder, or is it? Pregnancy and STDs can be lethal psychologically if not literally. There is more at stake than “female feelings”.

And yet, feminists or anyone who would “call for airstrikes” (that is, call for the killing of combatants and innocents) in response to acts of rape might ask themselves: could my understandable rage be more adaptively channeled? Are there alternative responses to rape ultimately more productive for victims and perpetrators than killing? Dead men can’t be held accountable.