All Alone in the Night

"Why can he not fight for those he loves?"
Eowyn, The Return of the King

As a general rule, when the particularly odd types suggest that the right is in some way comparable to the fanatics in the Muslim world the west is currently fighting, I tend to tune them out. Then I read Kathleen Parker and wonder if there isn't some small justice to that argument.

Ms. Parker has an opinion piece up in today's Washington Post arguing that Iran is in some way morally superior to the west because they dress their women up in hijabs rather than letting mothers of young children go to war. "When a pretender to sanity such as 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." That may be how Ms. Parker sees the world, and she is probably correct that much of the Muslim world will concur with Ahmadinejad's opinion, but the fact that much of the world relegates women to second- (or third-) class citizenship is no indicator that they're right.

Let's begin with the obvious. The average woman shouldn't be a frontline soldier. Modern combat requires a degree of physical strength that most women (and some men) simply don't possess. As I prepare to go to Iraq, I have to accustom myself to wearing 30 pounds of body armor, plus a pistol and a carbine and ancillary gear that adds another ten-plus pounds. Assuming an average woman comes in at 5'5" and ~140 pounds, that's 28% of her body weight. Running around in all that will wear down bodybuilders, and physiologically, women start out with less muscle mass and so are going to wear down faster, on average. But not everyone is average. The U.S. Army used to require strength tests for certain specialties, and it would be wise to go back to that, as some men really shouldn't be on the frontlines any more than the average woman, and some women probably could pass muster if given the chance. Combat arms would still be predominantly male, but testing based on ability rather than gender would probably make the Army better off in the long run.

On the other hand, there are plenty of things that the Army needs done that don't require physical strength. In today's Army, the ratio of tooth to tail is extremely low; most soldiers are involved in supporting the small number of fighters. While many combat arms types like to think that makes the others lesser soldiers, the fact is that without that tail, the tooth would fail in short order. An M1A1 tank will run out of fuel in a day, and ammunition even faster in heavy combat. An infantryman carries only enough supplies to sustain himself for a few days at best. The Army does thousands of things every day that don't directly involve combat, but are no less vital to accomplishing its mission of defeating America's enemies. And for the vast majority of those jobs, women can do them just as well as men. Since it seems safe to assume that both men and women's abilities are normally distributed, preventing women from serving means the Army ends up with less-qualified men doing some of those jobs. That is no way to run national defense.

Further, while I may be in the minority, I believe that everyone has the right to decide for themselves what they want to do with their life. Like the U.S., Britain uses only volunteers in its military. I don't know why Seaman Faye Turney joined the British Navy. Maybe she just needed a job. Maybe she wanted to be part of the great tradition that marks the Royal Navy. Maybe she wants to see the world and sees the Navy as a path to that end. Whatever her reasons, her presence among the 15 captured British sailors in Iran strikes me as an indication of the strength of the west, not our weaknesses. An Iranian woman would never have the chance to choose the life Faye Turney has chosen. No, she would not have left her child behind while she went off to war, either, as Ms. Parker notes with no small outrage. But men have been leaving their children behind to go to war since the first group of cavemen decided it would be easier to steal another tribe's stuff than to make their own. That's not a good thing, but I fail to see why women should be denied the right to fight for what they believe in simply because their plumbing is different.

Would Seaman Turney's child be better off if she were there to raise him all the time? Maybe, but it seems to me that Seaman Turney is teaching her child a pretty important lesson by being away: that the important things in life are worth making sacrifices for. Many may disagree with what she has chosen to sacrifice for, but I hope we can agree that she should have the right to make those decisions.

Which of our societies is stronger? The one that forces women to stay home and raise children, or the one that allows (if not yet encourages) women to choose their own fate and to do what they do best?