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NOW THAT we’ve learned that Pfc. Jessica Lynch may have been raped by her Iraqi captors, it’s time to put every Presidential candidate on the spot about the subject of women in combat.

Which Presidential candidate will, for the sake of future Jessicas who want to serve their country in the military, promise to reinstate the Pentagon “risk rule” that might have protected her from rape at the hands of the enemy by placing her in a unit farther away from the fighting?

Will Wesley Clark, who has spent his whole career managing military personnel, admit that endangering female troops by stationing them close to combat is a mistake and a threat to overall troop morale?

Will John Kerry, who also witnessed the savagery of war during Vietnam?

Will Howard Dean, who seems to have plenty of opinions on how to prosecute a war, though little experience?

Until 1994, women were not assigned to units close to the front. President Clinton changed that policy by eliminating the “risk rule” in the name of gender equity. Why hasn’t President George W. Bush reversed this 1994 decision, despite the persistence from well-respected groups such as the Center for Military Readiness in Washington?

According to her book, “I’m a Soldier, Too,” and her Veterans Day interview with Diane Sawyer, Jessica Lynch’s doctors told her the lacerations they found were caused by anal penetration in the three hours after the petite blond 19-year-old was captured, a period she says she can’t remember. Her convoy took a wrong turn as it followed a combat unit through the desert. It appears Jessica suffered the same fate as Maj. Rhonda Cornum, a surgeon whose helicopter crashed during the first Gulf War.

So, yes, all you proponents of women in combat, we can count on Saddam’s loyalists to rape our female troops when they’re caught. If we invade Syria and Iran, perhaps our women will be raped some more.

The places where American troops can be predicted to fight in the next decade are not exactly bastions of human rights; they are rogue nations for a reason. These are places that devalue women, scoff at Western morality, and ignore the civilized world’s rules of war. (Christian countries are sometimes no better. Recall the Serbian army’s use of rape as a torture system in the early 1990s.)

These places are the polar opposites of the university campuses and liberal Washington think tanks that hatch naive ideas such as putting women in the line of fire. Are we, as a nation, comfortable sending our mothers and daughters to places where they will almost certainly be raped if captured while serving their country? No. (And if that’s not your answer, it should be.)

Now that Jessica Lynch — who enlisted in the Army as a supply clerk with the belief her 5-foot-3-inch frame would never be put in danger of capture and rape — appears to have been raped, it’s time to fix the problem.

Prior to 1994, a female supply clerk like Jessica probably would not have been so close to danger — in a desert convoy trailing combat forces with toilet paper and meals-ready-to-eat. Before 1994, the Pentagon wisely shielded non-combat servicewomen from support positions close to the action where they faced a “substantial risk of capture.”

Just as every Marine is a rifleman, no matter what his military occupational specialty, every soldier near the front is in danger of capture, torture and death. But women face an additional danger in rape that men do not and throughout the history of war have not.

It’s one thing for a woman to request a combat situation, as female military aviators do. It’s quite another for a woman who enlists, believing she is freeing a man to fight, to be forcibly assigned a combat support position near the front, as Jessica was.

According to a 1998 Government Accouting Office survey, only 10 percent of female privates and corporals favored the military’s policy of involuntary assignment of women to near-combat positions. The government has since stopped asking this question on its surveys, the Center for Military Readiness points out.

If you don’t want your daughter or sister to suffer the same fate Jessica Lynch may have, confront the candidates when they are campaigning in New Hampshire and cannot squirm out of answering. And sign a petition at www.americansforthemilitary.com, asking President Bush to reinstate the “risk rule” before our nation’s hearts are broken again by another rape of a servicewoman.

Bernadette Malone is the former editorial page director.

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