The German-Filipino Wurzbach, 26, is a fashion model and TV personality who's acted in movies, but nothing could have prepared her for the question thrust upon her on the pageant stage. The fault for putting her in such a precarious position lies with the organisers and whoever came up with the question. Presumably they were attempting to see if she could shed some light on the contentious issue for the intellectuals in the audience. Instead, her response - like any individual reply in a man-on-the-street survey - proved nothing, and it certainly won't change any minds about the US military base. Nor would it have made a difference if she'd opposed the base's reopening.
The US and its coalition partners invaded Iraq against the will of the world as represented by the United Nations, so how could the opinion of Miss Universe alter Washington's designs? The issue then becomes the fairness of posing such a hand grenade of a question in a glorified beauty contest.
To the argument that Wurzback was merely given a chance to voice her opinion about a news story, we point out that she was aiming to become Miss Universe, not win the Nobel Prize or a columnist's job at the New York Times. (She would have needed more than three seconds to mull the answer if either were the case.)
Controversial discourse has no place in popular entertainment of this kind. Beauty pageants in particular, though they're no longer called that in these politically correct times, are still about glamour and glitz and dreams dashed or fulfilled. It's nice that mere prettiness combined with middling stage talent is no longer enough to win the title, but suddenly we do find ourselves longing for the days when the most "political" comment a contestant would ever make was that dreary recitation of hopes for world peace.
If getting the young ladies to pontificate on the pressing issues of our decidedly non-peaceful world is intended to curtail criticism about shallowness and sexism, it strikes us as just another application of cosmetics.