Tim Blair was probably joking when he quipped that North Korea's aversion to the Saddam Treatment, recently reported, is based on the photographs from Abu Ghraib.

Americans, comfortable with equality in most occupations, have focused their concern over Near East reaction on the contempt and depravity in the pictures, universally apparent and understood. But that at least three of the photographs involve cruelty at the hands of a woman — two of them with that leering, round-faced brunette, a cigarette hanging out of her mouth — carries, if these photographs are not omitted from circulation, the potential for a profound shock to the misogynistic pits of the Near East. Male American soldiers mistreating prisoners would be par for the state-controlled propaganda course. But a woman? Someone who would be relegated to a veil and silence, from Tehran to Riyadh to Damascus? In 1945, the Japanese, in whose culture women were wholly subservient, were more than curious about the womens' corps disembarking from transport ships to fulfill traditional roles as clerks, nurses and couriers. Neither tradition nor even the licentiousness that extremists usually ascribe to American women are in the snapshots in question. Instead, women shared the work of the barbarian, not only standing alongside their male counterparts in disobeying law and honor but superior to their charges — humiliating, quite literally, the pride of Islamofascism. To be frank, I'm intimidated.

The photographs from Abu Ghraib are anathema to the American inspiration and will at least slightly damage our bid for Muslim hearts and minds. Yet one can't help but wonder how the images viewed by the dedicated enemy — who are unlikely to become more hateful — will affect the enemy's reception of us.

INTERESTING: I'm not the only one to take it from this angle.