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CBS News has just reported that on-air correspondent Lara Logan “suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating” while covering the crowd celebration in the wake of Hosni Mubarak stepping down last week. Her attackers were among the “heroes” of the Democratic movement in Egypt in Tahrir Square.

No further details regarding her condition are available at the time of this writing, but one assumes if her injuries were life-threatening, the CBS piece would have lead with that.

I hate to say it, because it’s sexist and chauvinistic and definitely not PC, but I’ve long asserted that women reporters don’t belong in some war zones. Specifically in countries where the indigenous population have been treating women like chattel for thousands of years.

And throwing someone with beauty-queen looks like Ms Logan into a mob situation in the middle east, unless she’s traveling with a pack of Blackwater gunslingers, is just begging for tragedy. I’ve spoken about it to The Missus. Logan came on the Jon Stewart show recently and I turned to The Missus and said, “She is way too hot to be going into all the middle-eastern hotbeds she reports from.”

Not because hot babes don’t deserve the same breaks as everyone else. Since when has being a hot babe (or dude) impeded someone’s career advancement opportunities? They should be disqualified because the same star quality that causes heads to turn when they walk into a crowded room also makes them natural targets out on the streets, especially streets filled with voluble males from a culture that sees women as things to be used.

People will read this and think, “Oh my God, he’s blaming the victim!”

I am not blaming the victim. I’m blaming the geniuses at Network who looked at their roster of talking-heads to put in the obviously potentially dangerous crowd—just ask Anderson Cooper—and selected the prettiest, blondest Western Infidel on their staff.

We can’t just accept that the people in the middle east live by a different set of values, we have to factor those values in when we make decisions about what the hell we’re doing over there. It was not taking local customs and recent history into account that got us hopelessly mired in Afghanistan. Which is another place I would not send Lara Logan. Or NBC’s Michelle Kozinski. Or Fox News’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of perky blonde anchor-spokespeople.

Who America needs on the front lines in the middle east right now is a grizzled veteran newsman like Dan Rather; he’s past his prime, his name is smeared with scandal and needs redeeming, he’s still sharp as a tack and tenacious as a bedbug. And at this point in his career, I guarantee you, there is nothing he would like more than to go down swinging in the field, preferably with his boots on.

I hope Ms Logan’s injuries are not grievous. I actually hope when she recovers, that she cannot remember the details of the attack. And I hope like hell that video of the attack does not surface; according to the CBS account above, it started during a live broadcast.

Everyone’s worried about the military hanging onto power indefinitely, or the Muslim Brotherhood taking over, but if these random Everymen-on-the-street—revelers, no less, no longer revolutionaries—who attacked Ms Logan are Egypt’s equivalent of Washington, Jefferson and Adams, we might very well be trading the devil we know for the devil we already know over there, no matter who ends up running the place.