Private Lynndie R. England, trailing an Iraqi prisoner on the end of her dog lead, is the most loathed woman in the world. Cigarette in mouth, finger stabbing towards the genitals of naked victims, she is, according to one newspaper, "the trailer trash torturer who shames the US."
Queens of violence, from Penthesilea of the Amazons to Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, can attract awe, but Lynndie is no upmarket she-devil. Instead, the response to the Abu Ghraib pictures likens her to a female warder of a Nazi concentration camp aided and abetted by her lover and co-abuser, Charles Graner.
England is a bit-player who's come to symbolize a wider horror story. Back home, family and friends are trying to work out how a "sweet, down-to-earth" paper-pusher who wanted to be a weather girl turned into a preening sexual predator.
By coincidence, Fort Ashby, a one-traffic light town in West Virginia, is also home to Private Jessica Lynch, the all-American heroine of the Iraq war until it turned out that her "rescue" from hospital was a stunt spun by the army. England, who is pregnant and detained in North Carolina, is unlikely to have her reputation similarly downgraded. Now facing charges of assault, she heads the female cast list of a ghastly parody of a cheap TV prison drama.
Janis Karpinski is a reserve brigadier general who was in charge of military prisons in Iraq -- she has since been replaced by the man who ran Guantanamo -- and including England, three of the suspects in the torture cases that happened on Karpinski's watch are female. In tune with a sexual motif deliberately repugnant to Arab men, one victim is seen with a pair of women's knickers draped over his head.
Amid the outrage inspired by such scenes, it is worth remembering that fury is selective. The uncharged suspects going slowly mad in Guantanamo Bay or Belmarsh high security prison in south London are not to be compared to Private England's trophy heap of naked men. Human rights are not always an obsession in Britain or the US.
Nor are violent women the aberration they are sometimes painted. Mothers ready to defend their children to the death are a common stereotype, while any notion that women are Stepford soldiers, caring and compliant, was challenged way before Boudicca headed the Iceni.
But, though female warriors have a long history, their legends rarely dabble in gory detail, let alone the fact that bloodlust can be triggered more by role than gender.
In 1971, researchers at Stanford University randomly assigned 24 students to be either jailers or prisoners and discovered that the "guards" quickly became swaggering sadists. Recent research by Professor Stephen Reicher, at St Andrews University, Scotland, revisited the Stanford work and disproved the idea of automatic brutalism. Group culture and leadership, he found, were the catalysts that turned ordinary people of both sexes into tyrants.
Even so, revulsion at the England case stems partly from evidence that women soldiers, more often mentioned in Pentagon dispatches as victims of sexual assault by male colleagues, also revel in power and cruelty.
The more troubling issue is who helped turn Lynndie England into an apprentice torturer. The list of suspects stretches from her superiors, through the CIA, to a president who called for the blood of "evil" men and a society who watched him spill it. Somewhere in her obscene behavior are the traces of all our fear.
The story that centers on Private England goes beyond gender. In the UK, disputed pictures of torture by British soldiers feature no women, though the Calvin Klein-style shots of a prisoner in his underpants suggest a hair and make-up team may be hovering in the wings. Real or phoney? That question should be applied more widely.
Mythology is a casualty of this war. Fairytales of female innocence are dead, laid to rest with the dream of the soldier, whose image is spared stories of barracks bullying at home and atrocities abroad. There are many fine ones, obviously, but nostalgia sits uneasily with a shot, even if mocked-up, of a rifle butt crashing into a prisoner's groin.
Old visions may be shattering, but the greatest chimera persists. The Iraq war was founded on fantasy. The myths of weapons of mass destruction and of cheering Iraqis fed the notion of domino democracy, in which clones of a nascent secular state would spread throughout the Middle East.
The problems of remodelling a country assembled by the British from Ottoman empire leftovers was not addressed. Nor was the question of how a population that is 60 per cent Shia fitted, democratically, with US opposition to a Shia-led regime.
The occupiers' stock is near zero, and still, in Washington and London, the myth lives on. As if playing the nursery game of grandmother's footsteps, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair treads faithfully in US President George W. Bush's erratic tracks. The US attacks Falluja, and Blair is all for that.
Troops give up and hand over to a Saddamite commander. Blair could not have planned it better himself.
In Iraq, a country of dying options, the UN and its security council are still the last, declining hopes of overseeing a transition to a sustainable future. As the choices fade, the coalition message remains: No change. Bush holds to the remains of his policy, and Blair, for whom moral certitude seemingly holds no Plan B, clings on beside him.
Lynndie England, however unpleasant, is not the the villain of this debacle. She is what happens when politicians prosecute shambolic wars in the name of piety. Lined up behind a heap of bodies topped by her gleeful little face are the shadowy stylists for this cameo of prison life.
The neo-cons who talked up this conflict helped create Lynndie. So did those who, like Colin Powell and much of Blair's Labour Party colleagues in London, failed fully to voice their doubts. Hers is not a parable of vicious women or bad-apple soldiers.
Abu Ghraib is an interim report on liberation. After a year of fighting and untold thousands of civilian deaths, the great battle of good versus evil has managed to find a new hate figure. Saddam Hussein has been replaced as monster-in-chief by a former chicken processor from West Virginia. It does not feel like progress.
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