Pete Seeger's old anti-war song is still pretty well known. The words, inspired by a passage from Mikhail Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don, slowly lead us through a cycle from the picking of flowers by young girls to the burial of their soldier husbands in graveyards, which then produce more flowers. Sorrowful as it is, at least it's a cycle and not an end game for human growth. Life, sanity, and hope revolve with their opposites in the course of the song, alternately shaming us and giving us heart for another try. The flowers return. What's more important, the young girls never go away. It's because they stay and grow old but remain as they are that war does not become an accustomed hell for both sexes and all ages.

Those young girls would pose a difficulty for many political liberals today, if they were to rear their pretty heads outside the elegiac world of the song and tell us what it is that makes them important. Ever since the first heyday of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" pacifism has been, for many people in the industrialized countries, a twofold thing: a heartfelt abhorrence of war, yes, but also part of a conventional set of shibboleths by which one is known as an enlightened, progressive sort of person and not just some gun-shy troglodyte. Everybody can mentally complete the set with more or less ease and with more or less reverence. It has been fairly stable over the years. However, there's one addition now that was still some way off at the fall of Saigon: feminism as a codified attitude.

War resisters in the Vietnam War era were called flower children and were best represented by the ineffable femininity, the rippling gingham and the abashing gentleness, of the females among them. True, there was a narcissistic side, and worse, to the flower children's counter-culture. The point is that they readily took the pastoral female principle as their ideal. They recognized a steadfastly nurturing Earth Mother as the symbol of peace, and mortal woman as its actual source. They thought the world needed more Yin and less Yang, more feminine shade and less masculine glare. More gratitude for a sheltering nest, and less eagerness for great exploits. If they had known then that the passage of a single generation would bring an editorial in The New York Times hailing the arrival of American women on the battlefield, they'd have felt that their cause had been lost forever. They know it now, those who survived the passage, and yet one doesn't hear many cries of revulsion at that particular development.

As far as the Iraq War itself is concerned, the opinions of American liberals today would not greatly surprise even a sudden caller from the 1960s. But then there's that Times editorial of 24 March, 2003, entitled "The Pinking of the Armed Forces." It begins in this way:

"The news that one of the American soldiers taken captive by the Iraqis over the weekend is a woman serves as a reminder of how the American military has evolved, slowly and sometimes reluctantly, into an organization where the dangerous jobs of war are performed by both sexes. While women are still barred from some sorts of duty, the case for equal footing is gaining ground.

"Thanks to changes in the law in 1994, women, who make up 15 percent of the military, are eligible for about 90 percent of all service positions. Those gains were a recognition of the performance of the 41,000 women deployed as part of Desert Storm three years earlier. Despite legal limits on combat participation, 13 women died and many more were wounded in that conflict."

Thanks? gains? performance? The editorial goes on to urge "debunking the arguments against fully employing [women]" in the armed forces and ends with these lines:

"The United States, with the most advanced military in history, is simply a laggard on the topic of women in combat. One million women served in the Soviet Army in World War II, and Israel, Canada and South Africa are among the countries that now give women combat roles. The American policies of excluding women threaten the readiness of the armed forces, particularly when there is no draft.

"A fuller integration of women into the American armed forces would of course carry the increased risk that women might desert, make mistakes or get killed. Or, they could outperform their male counterparts. It's happened before."

That's what is known, in the journalistic trade, as missing the story. An age of constant war and universal warriorhood is apparently dawning; the well of peace is being poisoned; and America's foremost liberal daily is busy ticking off items on the feminist agenda. So, it seems, are the people who decide things in such civilized places as Canada. The editorial writer must be pardoned for implying, in his or her eagerness to pile on as many examples as possible, that what was good enough for Soviet women under Stalin should be good enough for American women. It's Stalin, after all, to whom we are indebted for the concept of political correctness.

An essayist likes to find a subject on which most contemporary writers are missing something, but here the thing missed is so great, and the missing so general, and the implications so monstrous, that the subject becomes nearly unapproachable. How does one begin to write about the obvious and the elemental, when the obvious and the elemental have been purged from literate society? There must be very little of genuine pacifism left in that society when a great liberal newspaper thunders,

"Politicians and Pentagon brass fear the emotional response that a large number of female casualties could engender with the American public, which is loath to see mothers, daughters, sisters and wives in body bags. But rather than elevate the worth of women, such arguments devalue the lives and family roles of men who also serve and die."

That is the sheerest sophistry, a kind of sophistry that has taken over the citadels of liberal thought in the West, leaving many thinking people politically homeless. It's all rhetorical technique. It tries mechanically to shift our attention away from the obvious (here, the savagery of a world in which women are expected to become warriors) to the contentious (a vague assertion of men's "family roles" which implicitly makes it all the same whether sons or daughters are sent to live in trenches). The Times writer, like many people of the enlightened and progressive sort, evidently sees other human beings as pictures on the walls of a mental room, a fresco in which women have uniformly become what the occupant of the room wishes women to be: half-girl, half-boy creatures who are so sensitive about their competence that they'll go to the most destructive lengths to prove it. Outside the room, that view is untenable. Everybody knows of a mother or a daughter or a sister or a wife who is, to her great credit, unfit for warfare in a way that is utterly different from any man's unfitness. Every parent who has set out to rear a child free from gender stereotypes, only to see the child invent those stereotypes before coming in contact with the outside world, knows there is something going on here which no rhetorical art can gloss. The Times must be aware that non-compliant beings exist outside the mental room, but it tries to slip past that difficulty:

"The American policies of excluding women threaten the readiness of the armed forces, particularly when there is no draft" (emphasis added).

Aye, there's the rub. After society adopts the principle of using women as combatants, and the draft subsequently returns, there will be no rationale for placing women on a different footing than men. We will all be Stalinists, then. If you think this is idle speculation, do an Internet search on the word women and the phrase military draft and see what turns up.

But suppose for a moment that you shared the editorialist's overarching interest in military readiness. Imagine a mother or daughter or sister or wife of your own acquaintance and concede, for the sake of argument, that she ought to put in a term of military service, trusting that she would not come home in a body bag. Very well; and who would protect her from being raped by her comrades-in-arms? The editorialist of The New York Times, writing in the above vein, would probably come up with something like "We must not cede the barracks to the rapist." But that sentiment is just another painting on the mental walls. The reality of the matter, which must weigh very heavily on the minds of real women and those who really love them, is that women in the military are unusually vulnerable to rape. "Well, they shouldn't be!" cries the Panglossian liberal. How true. The Panglossians among us will of course straighten out that kink in the world as soon as possible. Until then, they will please refrain from attacking the social sanctions that enable women to keep away from rape-infested areas.

But this is playing the editorialist's game, disputing current questions of ideology and interest while overlooking the background. It seems so natural to do so, if you've made the historical passage gradually and not in one jarring time slip. And yet it's not natural at all. It's a case of that political disease of the past century which makes progressive-minded people become so obsessed with the internal logic of a cherished cause that they will pursue it to the destruction of all other cherished things.

War is essentially a male institution arising from men's traditional ambitions, men's traditional sense of priorities, and the tendency of men and boys to form large groups for the purpose of projecting power, as opposed to the tendency of women and girls to seek civilized relations through intimacy. An entire populace made available for securing whatever military "readiness" men's future ambitions may require: that's hardly a woman's vision. On the contrary, the editorial statement of The New York Times encapsulates the compromised feminist vision of our time in its combination of egalitarian appeal and underlying masculine bias. Its subtext is the aim of marginalizing women who are not amenable to the male principle.

This insistence on male and female principles may seem less retrograde if one thinks of it as an Eastward-looking tribute to Yin and Yang or, in more mundane fashion, relates it to the known patterns of everyday civilian violence. Those patterns do suggest that resorting to force is especially a weakness of males. Either historical woman is not a mere product of social conditioning, or social conditioning has produced something of immense value to the world and all that lives in it; something that is at least indispensable until the botched conditioning of historical man has been corrected. As G. K. Chesterton writes in What's Wrong with the World (1910),

"The shortest way of summarizing the position is to say that woman stands for the idea of Sanity; that intellectual home to which the mind must return after every excursion on extravagance. The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet's; but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic's. There must in every machine be a part that moves and a part that stands still; there must be in everything that changes a part that is unchangeable. And many of the phenomena which moderns hastily condemn are really parts of this position of the woman as the center and pillar of health."

Chesterton, being Chesterton, leads on where we would not care to follow: he concludes that women should not participate in political life. Still, being Chesterton, he has put his massive finger on something of vital, elemental importance in the background of our petty struggles.

Human beings have always lived in a cycle of war and peace which is, for the survivors, an ebb-and-flow of sanity. Men go to war and derange themselves. They come back knowing they have done so, uneasily accustomed to things morbid and mad, doubting their own humanity. Women, meanwhile, have kept the sane part of the world intact. They've preserved it for everybody by keeping to it themselves. Man returns, and woman teaches him to be human again. This is not simply a matter of resuming the old routines of peace. Woman is able to give man heart for another try at sanity only because she is reliably sane herself. There must be a principle in the world that is the very antithesis of war, if the human race is to improve. In most societies until now, woman has been that principle.

It's no use arguing, as our increasingly hypothetical editorialist might, that experience of combat will make women all the more capable of teaching others to love peace. It doesn't work that way. To young people, there's no figure more beguiling than that of the somewhat older person who has been to hell and back. As surely as Experience calls, "Do as I say and not as I do," Youth will respond, "Yeah, sure." When we're young we long to join the club of tragically experienced and romantically haunted figures, and our minds race over the interval that must be spent in hell. That's really a large part of the war problem, the perennial longing of boys to be battle-hardened men. Showing them battle-hardened women will not help matters.

Hereupon, a proposal. There is now an active network of organizations and individual volunteers dedicated to helping women defend themselves against domestic violence and other forms of abuse or exploitation. Let that network perform the following functions, as well:

1. Counseling women against military service and helping financially needy women find alternatives.

2. Campaigning against any attempt to enlarge the warrior pool by including women.

America's current leaders evidently believe, like Islamic fundamentalists, that the male principle is God's principle and should rule the world. If they think at all about the killing and maiming of innocent people, including children, in their pursuit of a new world order, they think of it as a price to be paid much the way corporate executives allow for a certain outlay to cover a certain number of lives destroyed by profitable activities. The male principle is grand indeed. It looks above mere life and sanity, reads destinies written in the clouds, spies rainbows beyond the storms and pots of gold beyond the rainbows. It grows stronger as people of both sexes learn to feel that it is quite a fine thing for women to go to war, thereby dulling the sense that it is quite a bad thing, a universally dehumanizing thing, to let war come to women. The world doesn't need more pseudo-men adept at playing a man's game and committing a man's follies. It needs more flower-picking, soul-nurturing, wise and witty Jane Austen women, and it needs to listen to them. That means often listening in private, out of the glare and away from the din.

There can be no accidental choosing, in this matter. We already know that when a whole nation submits to the male principle it breeds unnatural things. People accept smart uniforms and shabby myths in exchange for everything of real value. Young egos grow on the solemn mock praise of patriarchs who intend to outlive them. Even people of the enlightened and progressive sort troop through the bright neon portal to desolation, not merely laying down their hope of grace in this or any other world, but vying to kick it away with the boldest show of self-assurance. If we make the same choice, we have to be prepared for the same unnatural things. It's no longer possible to plead ignorance, because we saw enough in the twentieth century to know the consequences of choosing to live under a single high and hard principle. Chesterton had somehow seen enough when the century was just a decade old:

"Man that is born of a woman has short days and full of misery; but nobody can picture the obscenity and bestial tragedy that would belong to such a creature as man that was born of a man."

Let the young girls speak now, or forever hold their peace. •