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While this goes on, John Miller, the well-liked and deceptively understated former Republican congressman from Seattle who runs the State Department's Trafficking in Persons Office and chairs the inter-agency Senior Policy Operating Group that coordinates all federal anti-trafficking grants and policies, is busily making history. He is causing radical reversals of longtime government indifference to and complicity in sex trafficking. He is taking on an American "pimp culture" whose present glamorization poisons the underclass ghettoes where the pimps preen and serve as role models for the young. He is unraveling well-financed plans to legalize prostitution throughout the world.

In the process, Miller is earning massive goodwill for the United States in country after country. A recent Times of India editorial -- which argued that "If Washington's hectoring galvanises New Delhi into action, it would be a signal service to the millions who are living in slavery" -- is typical of recent reactions in such countries as Russia, Japan, Greece, and Israel.

On the domestic side, administration anti-trafficking efforts are now galvanizing domestic law enforcement authorities to end the immunity of pimps and massage parlor operators from criminal prosecution. The FBI has organized a dedicated and sophisticated unit to address the issue, and the Civil Rights and Criminal Divisions of the Justice Department, the Internal Revenue Service, and other federal agencies have initiated coordinated money laundering, tax evasion, and RICO prosecutions against major interstate traffickers. Tough follow-up initiatives are being actively planned.

THE IMPETUS FOR ALL THIS has come directly from the President, whose 2003 National Security Policy Directive 22 instructed all federal agencies to put the United States squarely on the "abolitionist" side of the issue. Critically, the President has backed up his talk with action, and has regularly sided with Miller in intra-administration battles over whether to rebuke friendly countries complicit in trafficking.

The trafficking issue still flies beneath the radar screen of the American media, but it won't for long. The Bush administration's rescue of millions of vulnerable, brutalized girls here and throughout the world is too powerful a story to be long ignored.

There's a lesson in this for the Democrats and mainstream feminists who have inadequately confronted their "prostitution gives me power" cohorts and who have failed to deal with the epidemic scourge of trafficking with the passion and priority it deserves. Before they know it, they may find that women's issues have been significantly redefined and that even to pro-abortion voters the abortion issue has lost its singular flagship status. More ominously, they may wake to find that the loyalties of many grateful soccer moms, and others, have gone -- gasp -- to the Republicans and conservatives who fought the sex trade while they looked the other way.

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