Via Stephen Green, I just read Charles Krauthammer's take on the scandal some are already calling "Torturegate".

Jihadists, like all totalitarians, oppose many kinds of freedom. What makes them unique, however, is their particular hatred of freedom for women. They prize their traditional prerogatives that allow them to keep their women barefoot in the kitchen as illiterate economic and sexual slaves. For the men, that is a pretty good deal -- one threatened by the West with its twin doctrines of equality and sexual liberation.

It is no accident that jihadists around the world are overwhelmingly male. It is very rare to find a female suicide bomber. And when you do, as with the young woman who blew herself up in Gaza, killing four others in January, it turns out that she herself was a victim of sexual subjugation -- a wife accused of adultery, marked for death, who decided to die a martyr rather than a pariah. But die she must.

Which is what made one aspect of the Abu Ghraib horrors even more incendiary -- the pictures of female U.S. soldiers mocking, humiliating and dominating naked and abused Arab men. One could not have designed a more symbolic representation of the Islamist warning about where Western freedom ultimately leads than yesterday's Washington Post photo of a uniformed American woman holding a naked Arab man on a leash.

.....The American offenders should surely be judged by our standards, not by others'. By our standards, these were egregious violations of human rights and human dignity. They must be punished seriously. They do not, however, reflect the ethos of the U.S. military, which has performed with remarkable grace and courage in Iraq, or of U.S. society.

The photographs suggest otherwise. Which is why the abuse at Abu Ghraib is so inflammatory and, for us and our cause, so damaging. It reenacted the most deeply psychologically charged -- and most deeply buried -- aspect of the entire war on terrorism, exactly as Osama bin Laden would have scripted it.

I mean that quite, um, literally.

What is terrorism? Striking fear in the heart of the enemy? If our enemy believes that Americans are sexually depraved people who can't wait for a chance to show them how much fun it is being Great Satan, what are they going to do about it? Get more pissed off than they already are?

I am reminded of Sherman's March, which was intended to humiliate and degrade the largely beaten South. One of the reasons it worked was not because Sherman's men were genuine demons (most of them in fact were not), but because the Southern press -- the "Southern Street" for lack of a better term -- exaggerated the nature and scope of the atrocities, and believed the exaggerations. (Here are some very colorful, and yes, even sexualized, Southern accounts.)

I do not mean to minimize Sherman's behavior, and I recognize that the bitterness survives to this day (interesting religious analysis here), but I don't think it is entirely out of order to ask whether any of this might have unrecognized (maybe hidden) psychological advantages.

Did Sherman's March, by infuriating the South, prolong the war? Quite the opposite. It's credited by most historians as a major reason for Southern capitulation. And like Southern Calvinists, Islamists are strong believers in predestination and fate. If they start thinking God has abandoned them, might they too begin to have doubts? Scratch a terrorist and you'll find a coward inside. The kind of people who believe in terrorism are the kind of people who mistake kindness for weakness, and who think that Americans would never resort to their tactics.

Not that Americans have done that as a matter of policy or ever would do that intentionally. But if the enemy thinks we have, might some of them be asking questions like, "Where's our god now?"

Don't ask me! I'm just playing Devil's Advocate here....

TORTURE OF ENGLISH UPDATE: When I posted the above Google result for the non-word "Torturegate," there were 38 hits. Today, there are 72. And this is only the weekend.

What the hell am I doing here? Trying to document the emergence of a new word? But I'm not even a lexicographer!

At times like this, I am tempted to call upon Janus, god of gates.