From the first, the American public (whose disdain for the details of even their own past has produced a national crisis in the teaching and learning of history) was asked to view what was happening inside Iraq without the benefit of historical context. Neither military spokespersons nor the news media were able or willing to pump air into this vacuum. Although the two groups joined forces to treat us to 24-hour coverage of the war, by the end of the campaign's first weekend, a set of baffling and potentially paralyzing questions dominated public discourse-questions that couldn't be answered without reference to history.

Our forces had driven to the outskirts of Baghdad in four days. Was that a good thing? Were we moving too slowly, or were we moving too quickly? The sudden appearance of vicious Iraqi paramilitary units along the supply and communication lines of our forward fighting units suggested that the coalition gamble had been too risky-hadn't it? Or does this sort of thing happen whenever a deeply penetrating attack is launched? And what about those Iraqi fighters-hadn't we been told that the Iraqi military was going to surrender right away? Why were they putting up such a desperate fight? And why were we making our troops operate under unusually restrictive rules of engagement? Of course, we needed to worry about civilian casualties, but didn't we always worry about them?

Neither supporters of the invasion nor its opponents provided historically informed answers. Administration officials did not hammer the most apparent and potent point available to them, that the speed of the American armored advance was greater than anything any nation had ever been able to achieve through comparable means, better even than our own U.S. armored divisions' performance during the famously rapid liberation of France in the summer of 1944. Nor did any military representative adequately explain that yes, whenever you launch deep armored strokes, the enemy will seek to cut your lines of supply and isolate your forward units-indeed, this is something that, far from fearing, you almost court, as it requires the enemy to leave at least some of his defensive positions and move about openly, making him vulnerable to attack by tactical air power and counter-maneuvers on the ground. Chess games such as this were played out during the German invasion of France in 1940, for example, and produced the infamous Allied disaster at Dunkirk.

Someone at the Pentagon might also have pointed out that in the period before battle is joined, you must never allow yourself to believe rumors about enemy strength. Remember our own George Armstrong Custer. Or consider the German general staff: Both in 1870-71 and in 1940, they were convinced that the French would put up a more determined fight against the invading forces than they actually managed.

History can be a sore subject. No one in the administration was willing to remind the public of just how much distrust had been sown when George H.W. Bush turned away from the Iraqi uprising during and after the first Gulf War in 1991. A reminder would have given the American public useful insight into the behavior of the Iraqi people-but it would also have tarnished the reputation of our current President's father. Though the administration chose to keep quiet, by the culmination of the current campaign, the news media and anti-war groups were making much of the betrayal angle, as were more than a few soldiers interviewed at the front.

To explain fully the strict new rules of engagement, American officials would have had to acknowledge that avoiding civilian casualties has never been a traditional American military priority. The planners of the Iraq invasion, aware that punishing civilians does nothing to hasten an enemy's demise and in fact only prolongs resistance, promulgated the new rules for our young soldiers, and the troops obeyed with a discipline unequaled since the great European professional armies of the 18th century. In doing so, however, our troops broke with two centuries of brutal American military tradition. And while the Bush administration and U.S. commanders talked with admiration of the behavior of our soldiers, they could not discuss the departure from past habits-not without implicit criticism of previous American generations, including the one dubbed "the greatest" by Tom Brokaw. (It's worth noting that Mr. Brokaw was forced to downplay the fact that during World War II, his "greatest" generation inflicted massive casualties against civilians, and against uniformed friendlies.)

The lack of attention to historical precedent was even more marked on the part of those opposed to the war in Iraq, and predictably so: For reasons unknown, when it comes to foreign policy and military affairs, the left seems generally to concede history to conservatives. "United, as ever, in opportunism and ignorance" (to borrow Tony Blair's recent indictment of the British Liberal Democrats), the anti-war movement declared months prior to the conflict that we would suffer massive casualties upon invading Iraq, and that the entire Arab world-or at least a good chunk of it-would band together to defy our forces, devastate our civilian population and shatter our international reputation. These predictions ignored the fact that from the rise of Islam and even earlier, Arab nations and tribes have almost always refused to help one another in moments of crisis (the salient modern example being the failure of wealthy Arab states to lend effective assistance to the Palestinians). Even when they have succeeded in coordinating their efforts, Arabs have generally fallen back to squabbling among themselves long before their enemy-whether Mongol, Turk or Western-has had a chance to defeat them.

As it happened, it was not solidarity but shame and shock that were voiced throughout the Arab world following the fall of Baghdad: shame at the speed of the Iraqi collapse, shock that Western forces were altering the political map of the region. "American tanks are creating changes in the Arab world!" bemoaned one Al Jazeera commentator, who didn't bother to mention that for too long, Arab leaders had themselves refused to initiate any meaningful amelioration of the lives of those who lived under sadistic despots such as Saddam Hussein. Only one Arab leader betrayed any awareness of the historical context: Osama bin Laden, in yet another recorded audio message, seemed to direct his bile as much at ever-fractious Muslims as at the nations of the West.

Many members of the anti-war movement hurled accusations of "fascism" and "imperialism" at their opponents, and a few managed to grab hold of Saddam Hussein's obsession with Joseph Stalin for long enough to hatch the idea that the coalition forces moving on Baghdad were headed for another Stalingrad. The estimable British historian Anthony Beevor, author of a definitive work on that earlier battle, needed precisely three minutes on ABC News to utterly demolish any supposed similarity between the two situations, and the anti-war groups reverted again to voodoo history.

That the third force in the war debate, the media, should also have shunned historical analysis is depressing, but unsurprising. Television anchormen and correspondents, as well as newspaper editors and reporters-whatever their protests to the contrary-almost invariably become infatuated when confronted by men and women in uniform: Surely the Pentagon knew this when they devised the system of embedded journalists, which took infatuation to the level of seduction. So potent was this romance that the U.S. Army of Experts (Retired) were never advised to slow the pace of their chatter, even though their greatest achievement during the war was that they were consistently wrong in analyzing it (a truth now universally recognized and often mercilessly mocked). Even Public Television's NewsHour , which can usually be relied on to muster a gaggle of historians when an American President so much as sneezes, did not deem the Iraq war worthy of historical analysis, and plagued its viewers with nightly visits from a rotating team of retired colonels, one or two of whom had insights worth hearing, but most of whom were as useless to the program as Generals Barry McCaffrey and Wesley Clark were to NBC and CNN, respectively.

Nothing-not even the rapid-fire madness of embedded reporting-created more confusion among the public than the ranks of bloviating experts. Certainly, there was no valid journalistic or intellectual reason for it: When newspapers and networks want political analysis, they don't go out and dig up obscure former Congressmen and governors to provide it. Why, then, do they believe that retired soldiers-many of whom, like politicians, have constituencies and patrons they serve and protect-would offer the best critique of a war? In their insecurity, they turned to the very characters who failed us in the last Gulf War. (There were a few exceptions to the media embargo on historical analysis. In the interests of disclosure and accuracy, I should say that I appeared on the same ABC program that hosted Mr. Beevor, and on other programs, too.)

Here's an example of how events are misjudged when military history is ignored. When American troops occupied Baghdad, the chief worry on all sides was that our soldiers would be perceived as occupiers rather than liberators, despite the fact that they had already been welcomed as friends in many other parts of the Iraq. Occupy the capital forcefully, we were told, and the good will of the Iraqis and the Arab world generally will be lost forever.

Any historian with even a passing acquaintance with the behavior of conquerors from Julius Caesar to Lawrence of Arabia's great competitor in the Middle East, British General E.H. Allenby, could have told you what would happen next. A conqueror often represents the only source of real order available to the subdued city or nation, yet the residents nonetheless often resist the imposition of that conqueror's control. The conqueror, if he is foolish, will try to exert his will at once; if he is wise, he will shrug innocently, hold his troops at a distance-and allow the conquered people their autonomy. Anarchy almost invariably ensues, and before long, the once-resistant citizens will be ready to accept-even to beg for-occupation and forceful rule by the conqueror.

I don't at all mean to add to the dark rumors circulating that the coalition forces tolerated or orchestrated the looting in Baghdad and other cities; and I vigorously reject the idea that coalition troops wanted the looting to go as far as it did. But I do believe that the military leaders failed to provide adequate threshold limits for the chaos-levels at which the coalition troops would be ordered to step in and stop the outrages. (The looting of hospitals, museums and libraries should never have been allowed.) That adequate ground rules were not provided was, I suspect, an error of omission. Whatever the case, it is not only unnecessary but farcical for American leaders to now go on suggesting that they could not have prevented the looting. After all (as every Iraqi knows), U.S. troops managed to protect the Baghdad Hospital when they needed to-and also all those precious Iraqi oil fields.

What the failure to provide looting guidelines reveals-especially in the case of the ransacked museums and libraries in Baghdad and Basra-is, at best, a careless and, at worst, a callous disregard for history. Yes, we should be thankful that American military planners paid great attention to history in assembling the coalition forces' operational orders and rules of engagement. But in all other respects, the past, it seems, was deemed simply not worthy of scrutiny. And this disregard, which finally must be laid at the feet of the leader responsible for initiating the campaign, President George W. Bush-a man, not coincidentally, of harrowingly limited historical interest or knowledge-is unspeakably dangerous.

Already, we seem to have forgotten that the Iraqi campaign began as a battle in the war on terror. We rightly invaded Iraq to prevent the confluence of two threats-weapons of mass destruction and international terrorism-not to bring "freedom and democracy" to the nations of the Middle East. But having given voice to those magical words, we now run the extreme risk of further enraging Muslim populations when freedom and democracy fail to materialize quickly and fully-as they almost certainly will.

Advocates and evangelists call such talk pessimistic. They talk endlessly of the Marshall Plan and of our efforts to rebuild post–World War II Japan. But we completely devastated both of those countries, and they were politically and morally isolated by 1945; a comparison to Iraq is strained at best. Even if the comparison were apt, we ought to remember that we still have large numbers of troops stationed in both Europe and the Pacific some 60 years later. Are we prepared for another massive, long-term commitment-to an Arab country? How would the pro-Israel lobby react if we were to grant an Arab country equal status with Israel?

A great many things that once seemed unthinkable have been happening of late. Perhaps a sudden appreciation of history will be among them. Perhaps we can, after all, pursue a balanced Middle East policy, and help bring that region-and, by extension, our own people-greater security. (After all, the coalition drive to Baghdad wasn't a miracle; it was simply an example of how to make good use of the lessons that military history has to offer.) Perhaps we will learn to rely on enlightened strength rather than arrogance. But it will be a tough fight, and a close one.

Caleb Carr's The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians (Random House) has been published in an updated and expanded edition.

Consider the dimensions of the victory, still incomplete, that the coalition and its allies within Iraq can now claim: In the space of one week, they allowed a plainly confused citizenry to progress from obsessive worries about whether Saddam Hussein's fedayeen would be destroyed in anything resembling the short term to visual assurances that those squads were being cut down like the murderous, frothing animals they've always been. At the same time, the coalition forces put to rest the question of whether and where the vaunted Republican Guard units might be lying in wait by demonstrating that most of them had been transformed into a horrific collection of body parts that filled bomb craters, ditches and ruined entrenchments all over Iraq. The coalition's army, a force unsurpassed by any in history in bravery and daring, and unequaled in its attention to discriminatory tactics, silenced those critics who wondered if Saddam's regime might not in fact enjoy the grassroots loyalty of a majority of Iraqis: They boldly destroyed first the weapons and then the symbols of Saddamite power, and were cheered in their work by a civilian population that began genuinely to believe that the transformation underway in their country might be permanent.

The process of dispelling the deadly black magic of authoritarianism that has for so long enthralled Iraqis was capped Sunday by preliminary reports that caches of chemical weapons may have been found, and then by the news (of equal if not more importance to the fighting morale of Iraqi insurgents and Kurdish forces) that the official most closely associated with the use of those weapons, Saddam Hussein's cousin "Chemical Ali," had been killed by coalition planes. Within a day, another electric rumor circulated: Not only Saddam himself but his brace of sadistic sons had been killed by bunker-buster bombs. In all, it was a week unlike any in modern American military history; and it may seem peculiar that one should encounter in this column anything but unqualified appreciation of and enthusiasm for the achievement.

But scheming politicians and businessmen can deflate the mood of any analyst, and the greedy plotting that has haunted, in the case of Iraq, can no longer be considered separately from the military campaign-not when it stands an excellent chance of tarnishing the great achievements of the campaign itself.

Who will be watching out for postwar Iraq? After the conclusion of hostilities, the focus of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld will shift to other matters affecting American national security all around the world-that's his job. The problem is that Mr. Rumsfeld will leave behind a very confused picture, peopled by a cast of dreamy lieutenants and profiteers. It's easy to imagine how this situation could degrade the nascent security that has been won for the Iraqi people.

The working models for postwar Iraq are said to be Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban and the Kurdish free state created in northern Iraq following the first Gulf War. Bits and pieces-and, in some cases, officials-from each experience will be adopted and adapted for use in Iraq generally, in order to create a situation in which (so goes the litany) all Iraqis will eventually feel free to participate in a free, open, democratic government. Since we are talking about one of the oldest civilized regions on earth-one where true democracy has never flourished-this may take some time, but the schemers show every sign of trying to stretch that time out longer than is necessary or advisable.

They hide their work absolutely and loftily: We are, after all, a country that has always profiteered with a noble fig leaf; and the man whose job it is in this case to spin a set of philosophical principles that will serve as a cover for the potentially exploitative occupation of Iraq is Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Possessed of a powerful intellect, along with ideas that, packaged in the best sort of benign American wrappings, are nonetheless characteristically self-interested, Mr. Wolfowitz is thought of as the eminence grise behind the idea that a democratic Iraq is possible, desirable-and will take far longer to embody than did the rehabilitation of Afghanistan (where a pre-assembled government was in place within weeks of the liberation of Kabul and where-not coincidentally-the potential rewards to American business were far lower).

Mr. Wolfowitz has been analyzed and reanalyzed in the press, yet he is not generally paired closely enough with the American to whom he bears the strongest ideological and psychological resemblance: Woodrow Wilson. This is perhaps understandable- Mr. Wolfowitz is a short, unassuming Jew, while Wilson was a puffed-up, posturing Presbyterian-but it's also troubling. For whatever the superficial differences between the two men, they share one overriding quality: a belief in evangelical interventionism. This passion caused Wilson's eight-year Presidency to become the greatest single period of American interference in the affairs of other governments in our nation's history: He was a serial, unilateral interventionist, and one gets the feeling that Mr. Wolfowitz-who increasingly enjoys the ear of another democratic evangelist, George W. Bush-may be trying to duplicate the feat.

"I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men!" Woodrow Wilson once railed; and although Mr. Wolfowitz's statements about Iraq and the Middle East are more soft-spoken and rambling, they often have the same sense of high moral purpose-and the same low estimation of the aspirations and abilities of the local populace. Like Latin Americans in Wilson's day, the people of the Middle East are generally people who have lived under post-imperial petty autocracies for so long that they have almost forgotten that any other type of government exists. And, again like those Latin Americans of a century ago, they look primarily to religion to ease the burdens of repressive regimes.

Indeed, there is entirely too much about the Middle East of today that might attract a Wilsonian missionary. The President-Who-Should-Have-Been-Preacher never did manage to "teach the South American republics" much of anything, except that they didn't understand what he was talking about-and, after enough harangues and bullets, no longer cared to even try.

Can President Bush, following Mr. Wolfowitz's ideas, do better with Muslims than Wilson did with Latin Americans? It seems unlikely, since neither man seems ready to drop the didactic tone, with its attendant belief that the native population in question is made up not of men and women, but of ignorant children. And whatever small chance Mr. Bush and Mr. Wolfowitz might have at success seems further doomed by still another factor that played a central role in giving the lie to Wilson's supposedly beneficent policies: the voracious appetite of international American corporations.

In early to mid-20th-century Latin America, the citizens of country after country heard the rhetoric of Wilson, but came up hard against the practices of American mining, agriculture and construction giants; and children though they may have been in the eyes of both the paternalistic Wilson and the far more sinister corporate magnates, those people understood the game that was being played out within their borders. Yet Wilson at least managed to keep the worst agents of corporate greed out of the White House itself; in our own time, by contrast, we have already seen the heavy, piggish hands of Vice President Dick Cheney and his multinational friends at work in the planning for a postwar Iraq. That Mr. Cheney attempted to secure a $600 million reconstruction package in Iraq for his own former company, Halliburton, without even a blush is almost as remarkable as the fact that, once that idea had been slapped down, he went right ahead and secured a smaller contract for one of Halliburton's subsidiary companies, K.B.R.

Shameless? Perhaps-but that word implies an initial understanding of what "shame" is, and there is nothing in the Vice President's career to suggest that he has ever embraced any philosophy more delicate than the belief that success in a corporate environment is what separates natural leaders from the rest of us. And for this reason, whether or not any company associated with Halliburton does end up biting off a nice, fat mouthful of the dripping Iraqi roast, there are a crowd of other Cheney cronies lined up to do the gorging. One way or another, Iraq is going to be good for those who have been good to the Republican Party-and democracy is not going to be allowed to travel abroad without toting the same cumbersome baggage it carried in Wilson's time.

Nor will Messrs. Bush and Cheney's Democratic opponents weep over this; or, if they do, it will only be because their dispenser of high-priced favors was not clever enough to wrest the great national prize from his opponent in Florida three years ago. Had the pillars of Big Labor known that they would be losing the reconstruction of an entire country in that process, they might well have pushed their Tennessee prince a little harder to play dirty; as it is, they still have such agents as Carl Levin of Michigan at their disposal in Congress, setting traps for the dispensers of Republican largesse in order to make sure that places at the trough are cleared for wealthy yet hungry Democratic interests (although Mr. Levin's constituents are already making out quite well, thanks to renewed defense contracts).

Cynics, of course, will groan and sigh and say that there's nothing new in any of this-and they're right.

But the threat posed to the lives and interests of Americans by Islamic terrorism is, by contrast, unprecedented, and in no way comparable to, say, the bandit raids of Pancho Villa into U.S. territory during Woodrow Wilson's Presidency. Characters such as Villa may have been capable of humiliating Washington, but they could not bring on full-scale crises: Wilson could ultimately afford to play his neurotic games of democratic nation-building in Latin America because they had no real cost to his own people (though he inflicted great suffering on Latin Americans). But the ventures of George W. Bush and Paul Wolfowitz may expose us to greater dangers than any we have known.

But it is to the memory of the military campaign still in its final phase in Iraq-and specifically, again, to the legacy of the men and women who have both fought in it and been killed and maimed as a result of it-that this venerable evangelical paradigm of American international behavior offers the greatest insult. The liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein has not been on a par with the wandering ashore of a detachment of drunken Marines-which was more than once Woodrow Wilson's method of insertion into troubled Latin American countries. Rather, the Iraq war has been (as this column has tried repeatedly to point out) that rarest of rarities in military history, a progressive campaign. In this campaign, we have seen innovative military principles and methods potentially change the political map of a region. Are we to sit back now and watch political and economic business-as-usual squander such momentous, such rare military achievements?

Perhaps. Or perhaps we will instead learn-for what would arguably be the first time in our nation's history-to value superior military methods over self-serving economic ends. Perhaps we will insist that our civilian leaders honor the achievements and sacrifices of our forces, and those Iraqis who have fought beside them, by rejecting the plan that Messrs. Bush, Cheney and Wolfowitz are trying to railroad through Congress, even as various Iraqi opposition groups scream their protests. Perhaps we will recognize that "Iraqi Freedom" may not mean "Iraqi American-Style Capitalist Democracy"; but then, our commanders presumably chose the first name rather than the second because it had a distinctly better ring to it. This ought to tell them something: We have sacrificed and inflicted sacrifices in order to liberate Iraq, and let its people live as they wish-not to remake it in our image. That is the work we must now be about; that is the only work that can match what our troops have done in the field.

Caleb Carr's The Lessons of Terror (Random House) has been published in a revised and updated edition.

Gambling regulations in this country don't allow for mid-race misgivings: The pikers have made their choice, and though some of them are making a great show of publicly tearing up their betting slips, they would perhaps do better to still their voices (and their pens) and sweat out the whole length of the race.

Even the hyperbolic performer-journalists riding with America's forward units through the Iraqi desert would be hard-pressed to find an adjective to describe the speed with which second-guessing has become America's new national pastime-no surprise, given that we're in the second stage of a military campaign, a notoriously difficult and nerve-testing time. But because this is an unprecedentedly public war, the second-guessing (and also the ongoing, indeed endless, noncontextual video images of tragedy, violence and loss) adds a very dangerous dimension. It gives the whole world the impression of a conquering power whose political, military and intellectual leaders will turn on each other at the first sign of stress; it saps the vital energies of those men and women who are actually in charge of the campaign, officers who must now waste time defending its high-risk/high-reward concept; and, worst of all, it may have actually stretched the famous "operational pause" in coalition momentum-the stumble at the first turn.

The global community of kibbitzers needs to pin the blame on somebody, and the culprit of choice is Donald Rumsfeld-not because he is micromanaging the campaign to the extent claimed by esteemed military analysts such as The New York Times ' resident batty aunt, Maureen Dowd (who, in her March 26 column, opined that the advance had been slowed because coalition air strikes failed to knock out Iraqi TV), but rather because Mr. Rumsfeld has aroused the enmity of many Pentagon and C.I.A. officials, along with a host of their ex-colleagues who are now paid media consultants. The credibility of these handicappers has of late been threatened, and now they're working overtime to save their jobs. The first criticism, already repeated so many times it has become an old saw of sorts, is that from the beginning, Mr. Rumsfeld didn't assign enough military force to Operation Iraqi Freedom. (Insufficient oats and shoddy tack, you could say.) Conveniently ignoring the fact that before the campaign began, many of their own number were whining about the possibility that there would not be enough spare American power available to deal with North Korea should Kim Jong Il decide to capitalize on America's focus on the Iraqi contest, these sages now whine that Mr. Rumsfeld did not pay sufficient attention to recently (and magically) revealed "intelligence" that supposedly predicted the use of terror tactics by Saddam Hussein's most despicable followers-tactics that would have to be met with, yes, "overwhelming force."

It is also true that so far as many military bureaucrats and journalists are concerned, Mr. Rumsfeld is just a big damned know-it-all, and it would be fun to see him take a fall.

The Defense Secretary's combative attitude toward the press in general-and specifically toward the highly coifed but (with several notable exceptions)intellectuallybereft Pentagon press corps-has left him without the kind of protection from the media that, for example, certain reporters at The Washington Post repeatedly offer C.I.A. director George Tenet (the man who squandered tactical surprise for the sake of a failed "decapitation" strike), or that Ms. Dowd's fellow New York Times columnists often extend to Secretary of State Colin Powell, architect of the doctrine of ... no, wait, that was his last job. We're still waiting for a diplomatic doctrine from Mr. Powell and the Bush administration; and with anger throughout the Muslim world raging, a lot of innocent American tourists and foreign-service officers-to say nothing of citizens at home-may well die waiting for it.

No matter , say the pikers back at the track, the fellas at the windows won't give us our money back, and you, Mr. Rumsfeld, you trained the damned nag-and then told us it couldn't lose-so you're the one who's going to restore our cash and our reputations. We knew all along that horse couldn't run, and look at him now: He's going into the backstretch and he's not four lengths ahead anymore, he's just bunched up with the leaders. It's a disaster. What do we care if Road Map for Mideast Peace was scratched, or if Win the War Before It Starts tripped at the gate-we didn't bet on them, did we? Hell, we barely even knew they were slated to run. You told us that Iraqi Freedom was going to make that great steed, Dad's Gulf War, look like an Army mule, and we went out in public and said we thought so, too. Well, it ain't so, and we're not taking the fall, you bum.

Conceits aside, let's be fair: Among Mr. Rumsfeld's less constructive personal traits is a tendency to insist that his plans and his judgments are utterly sound, even in the face of contradictory evidence. In this case, the contradictory evidence is the fact that Operation Iraqi Freedom did hit a snag this week: a more complex system of terror and blackmail on the part of Saddam Hussein's most loyal tribal followers and operatives than anyone could have guessed at. Yet there's no shame in having been thrown by the sight of American servicemen and women captured, berated, perhaps tortured (the implements were on hand), maybe even executed and dismembered. When fedayeen hold children in front of them as they fire on coalition troops, or when regular Iraqi troops wear civilian clothes (sometimes women's clothes) and hoist white flags in order to get close enough to kill, a pause seems an appropriate response-if only to devise rules of engagement and combat tactics to counter a style of fighting that would have shamed the Ottoman Turks at their nadir.

With their denials, Mr. Rumsfeld, General Franks and the other commanders in the field-with the notable exception of Army Lt. Gen. William Wallace, who allowed his doubts about the campaign and the resistance it had encountered to be overheard by journalistic embeds-only made "the pause" seem more ominous.

Interviewed by embeds, grunts at the front-though they allowed that they weren't getting the full complement of rations-wondered why they weren't still barreling northward. Yes, they said, the enemy was surprisingly persistent and vicious; and yes, they said, they were disturbed when they participated in or heard of the deaths of innocent civilians who had either been used as or mistaken for human shields. But they were nonetheless ready to go. The Air Force had the Republican Guard pinned down in their entrenchments well outside Baghdad; if the planes could keep them there, the foot soldiers and tankers sensed, they could insert themselves between those outer positions and the capital with the same dramatic speed and decisiveness that had put them 50 miles from the city in just four days. Using quickness, maneuver and daring, they could draw their own perimeter inside Saddam's infamous "red line."

But they were unaware, those eager troops, of the political and editorial firestorm that had been lit, first by the pause, second by the riotous antiwar demonstrations that were erupting-throughout the Muslim world and in non-Muslim countries as well-because of numerous photo images (some from Western embeds) of civilian casualties and deaths. The strong probability that many of those deaths were the handiwork of the Saddamite regime was, of course, buried by the Islamic press. The coalition is killing innocent Iraqis, sources such as Al Jazeera quietly insisted; and they found subtle parrots in European organs, among them the B.B.C., which began to refer to murderers like the fedayeen as "the forces of resistance" in order to appeal (according to its own executives) to the antiwar segment of the British public.

The pause evolved, as such pauses will, into a creeping paralysis, a variety of political panic so acute that it led to that most dangerous of outcomes for the American forces: the return of linear strategy. Suddenly, the operation's original goals-to get to Baghdad as quickly as possible, to isolate Saddam from his troops and supporters, to seal the city off (leaving avenues of escape for civilians who wished to try, and letting the Iraqi security forces in the city reveal their tactic of slaughtering escapees on international television)-were all put on a back burner. Talk of bringing units level and stabilizing the front began to be heard: The ghost of Dwight Eisenhower (the supreme commander who blocked a deep, rapid Allied thrust into Germany in the fall of 1944 because of political and supply anxieties, thus prolonging the war in Europe for as many as six or seven months) had appeared amid the forest of flat-screen teleprompters in Doha to haunt Central Command and pour cautious poison into every ear.

Mr. Rumsfeld and General Franks were quite correct when they told the public that the coalition troops had never stopped fighting, never stopped capturing and killing Iraqis, and never stopped taking important positions; but there was no mistaking that the lunge for the throat at Baghdad had been delayed, nervously put off as a result of public reaction to irresponsible, non-contextual television images, as well as by deep, even harrowing, political concerns: After all, the political future of the President rests on the outcome of this war. And the President has every intention of securing victory-even if, in the meantime, the global and regional prestige of the United States deteriorates to an all-time low. (The Secretary of State admits he will make no attempt to mend fences-there will be no meeting, say, with the new Palestinian prime minister-while conflict rages. But he has, of course, traveled to a country that has betrayed us: Turkey.)

And if indictment by the press and by foreign "allies" such as the Saudis leads the American public to blame Secretary Rumsfeld-well, what can Mr. Powell, Mr. Tenet or Mr. Bush do about it? After all (to return to the original metaphor), it was Mr. Rumsfeld who trained Iraqi Freedom, wasn't it? The others are merely the animal's owners: They liked his early speed, certainly, but they won't be crushed if he shows rather than wins. So long as he finishes in the money, as Dick Cheney might say, that's all that counts. If Global Alienation takes first, and Future Conflict places, not a problem-the little colt just has to come in ahead of the dreaded spoiler, Lost Election.

The terrified administration bigwigs up in the grandstand boxes ought to remember one thing that's apparent to anyone viewing the race from the rail: The horses have only just entered the backstretch, disappearing behind the scoreboard as they go. Plenty of unpredictable jockeying goes on in that obscured part of the track; away from the anxious eyes of his owners, Iraqi Freedom may find again the stride that gave him the burst from the gate.

So, a word to the wise: Keep those scapegoating manifestos and those political and military eulogies for Mr. Rumsfeld hidden for now. And all you nervous onlookers who bet on the supposedly undersized horse that is this invasion, don't go tearing up your slips just yet. In a matter of hours, the rumbling field will reappear, heading into the final turn; then we'll see if this animal's closing surge is a match for his early speed.

Caleb Carr's, The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians, ( Random House ) has been published in an updated and expanded version.

In planning for this battle, both the American-led coalition and Saddam Hussein have drawn inspiration and methods from the Middle Ages as much as from the Information Age. Yet with a perversity that is not entirely surprising, neither modernism nor medievalism has consented to wear the uniform of just one side-and both have manifested themselves in unexpected agents and behaviors.

Consider, for instance, the ambitious opening effort by coalition forces to kill Saddam Hussein, his sons and their top advisers with cruise missiles and bunker-busting bombs. The move was referred to by the American military as a "decapitation attempt," a suitably anachronistic title for a tactic that (while certainly legitimate) looked for its inspiration and validation not to the modern age-during which such behavior has generally been viewed with distaste-but to medieval and even ancient times. (The decapitation strike was the brainchild of the American institution that most resembles a cabal of the Middle Ages: the Central Intelligence Agency.)

Subsequent attempts have been made to cut off all the many heads of the monstrous Iraqi Republican Guard, as well as those of the perhaps even more reprehensible state security apparatus, Saddam's supposedly suicidal fedayeen and the various armed Baath political militias. The coalition relied again on its seemingly unlimited supply of technologically complex bombs whose "smartness" has done nothing to temper their essential and spectacular violence. Images of the resulting destruction were soon being shown-to singular psychological advantage-by newspapers and television networks throughout the Muslim world. Exploiting the tools of information technology, these media organs worked hard and with considerable success to demonstrate that the allied coalition had returned to the old Western (for which read "crusading") habit of grinding enemy populations into the dust.

In the opening round, the coalition chose the weapons of modernism and the psychology of medievalism; the Iraqis reversed the equation and gained a momentary advantage (witness the increasing frequency and violence of anti-war demonstrations throughout the world).

Yet the thunderous explosions and images of the miniature mushroom clouds produced by the bunker-busters could not forever obscure the fact that the Iraqi assertions were perfidious manipulations. In truth, while coalition bombs were indeed falling on Iraq's cities relentlessly, they were doing so with an accuracy that matched coalition-and specifically American-pledges: Iraqi fighters, in all their various guises, were certainly enduring a hellacious firestorm, but by Saturday night (the second of the "Shock and Awe" air campaign), an official of the Iraqi Information Agency was telling CNN that he had received reports of only 200-plus civilian casualties throughout Saddam's domain-and the official made no mention at all of fatalities. Even if this seemingly incredible tally (made by a representative of a group with an interest in exaggerating the savagery of the coalition invaders) is only roughly accurate, it would mark a miraculous achievement.

Miracles, of course, are never orphans. In this case, the U.S. Air Force, always adept at claiming credit where little or none is due, rushed to announce its paternity. Retired and active officers-who for weeks prior to the opening of the campaign had voiced grave doubts about the abbreviated role their service was to play in the coalition battle plan-began to rhapsodize about the improved targeting technology of their bombs. What they mostly failed to mention (perhaps to protect the men themselves) was the ongoing work of coalition Special Forces operatives inside Iraq, who for months have been identifying targets as legitimate or out-of-bounds. In short, it was another ancient weapon-almost astounding human daring-that actually swung the pendulum of psychological advantage back toward the coalition side.

Demonstrating that their embrace of progressive military methods in Afghanistan hasn't been a passing fancy, the coalition launched its ground attack into Iraq at the same time that its bombs were falling on the country's urban areas, in line with the fundamental principles of modern mobile, mechanized warfare established by the great armor campaigns of the Second World War. From the first, coalition forces emphasized speed and maneuver over attrition, the need to bypass enemy strongholds rather than subdue them, and a rampaging drive to get at the enemy's vitals before an effective defense of any one part of Iraq (outside of the long-since established fortifications around Baghdad, that is) could be managed. The effort was not without bizarre mishaps or lamentable casualties; but none were significant enough to slow appreciably the pace of advance, and it soon appeared that the Iraqis were on the verge of being seized by panic-exactly the result sought by the great 1930's theorists of "lightning war."

But with dreadful suddenness, the age of the coalition campaign's operational ethos was revealed (the interwar period is now some 70 years gone) by Saddam's defensive plan, which is based on a more contemporary belligerent tactic: terrorism. Elements of the dictator's most vicious fighters had been detailed among the forlorn Iraqi regulars in the south, who were bypassed by the allies. As the armored columns sped towards Baghdad, the fanatics-per Saddam's long-standing orders-kept their weapons trained on their countrymen even more than on the invading enemy, and when the coalition lines of supply and communication had been stretched tight, they ordered the regulars to strike. If those hapless (and sometimes weaponless and shoeless) men would not obey, the Republican Guardsmen and fedayeen simply tore off their own uniforms and blended into the civilian population. They waited until the coalition had sent all but slender garrison forces ahead-and then struck murderously themselves.

Lethal ambushes and false surrenders abounded. While the effect on coalition military might and progress was minimal, the psychological effect was maximized by a weapon that the coalition itself had unwittingly brought along, as if to allow Saddam some sort of handicap: the "embedded" television press corps.

With the decision to integrate both print and television journalists into military units (correspondents and cameramen not only travel but live and train with the soldiers), President George W. Bush and certain of his advisers demonstrated once again their belief that history has begun anew with them. In fact, the history behind this journalistic innovation is long, torturous and important.

Throughout the ages, few phenomena have incubated so much misery as the interaction between soldiers and civilian populations during wartime. From the beginning of organized violence, soldiers have viewed civilians as prey and spoils, while civilians have viewed soldiers as little more than rapacious criminals. So great did this mutual contempt grow that by the Middle Ages, philosophers, legalists and military men had begun to search for ways to limit the impact of the first group on the second.

In the West, this movement led to the professionalization of armies and accompanying codes of discipline for soldiers. (In most of the rest of the world, however, soldiers' treatment of civilians as sources of food and funds and objects of violent lust went on, as did the average civilian's fear and hatred of combatants.) Western warriors began to do their work outside the direct view of most civilians. Various legal restrictions on just what and who could be involved in military engagements (culminating in the Geneva Conventions and Accords of the 19th and 20th centuries) dramatically reduced the risk run by noncombatants. Though these codes were often violated, outrages no longer occurred with anything approaching the regularity that they had in earlier centuries. More and more, civilians learned of war from the work of writers who witnessed it rather than by hard experience.

Writers thus accrued a predictably large measure of influence over military affairs, based on how much they did or did not reveal about a given army's plans and actions. Indeed, so significant did this influence become that, by the time of the American Civil War, William Tecumseh Sherman declared that if he could, he would shoot all war correspondents as spies. There was a great deal of logic behind his passion. Nonetheless, by the time of the First World War, the public at home-generally safe but worried about fathers, sons and husbands on the battlefield-had made the war correspondent's profession profitable and popular to an extent that would likely have caused the irascible General Sherman to revisit his sometime haunt, the sanitarium.

Generals of a different nervous temperament, however, learned not to despise but to manipulate the press: T.E. Lawrence, for example, could never have become the great legend of Arabia without the studious efforts of correspondent Lowell Thomas. Myths were not difficult to manufacture or fine-tune: The public's appetite for tales of martial valor only grew with its greater remove from the dangers of the battlefield.

Television altered this equation. On the one hand, stories of battlefield excitement could be illustrated as never before; on the other, televised images more often than not revealed that war was a terrifying, dangerous and often psychologically shattering experience. The power of the camera made most modern military commanders shun war correspondents even more assiduously than had General Sherman, and not simply to conceal their own sins: Three centuries of hard experience taught that a little information carefully distributed could encourage public support for an army, while too much information liberally distributed-remember Vietnam-could help frustrate a nation's (or at least a Presidential administration's) interests. The relationship between television and the military became singularly ambiguous-an unresolved situation seemingly beyond resolution. But for their new war in Iraq, Mr. Bush and his advisers jettisoned all the old qualms about allowing cameras to show too much. Convinced of the absolute moral rectitude of his struggle against Saddam, Mr. Bush apparently believed that embedded correspondents would only add to the campaign's glory by allowing the public to see the two undertakings-military and journalistic-as one great and just national mission. Instead, before the first week was out, the administration's new media policy became the factor most likely to complicate, frustrate and perhaps endanger the success of a military campaign whose brilliance cannot disguise the fact that it is, after all, a military campaign, and as such loaded with death, bloodshed, blunders and acts of betrayal as well as bravery.

Like other nations, we prepare soldiers for weeks, months and sometimes years before they're exposed to the visual and emotional horrors of combat; evidently, we now expect untrained civilians to make instant sense of these sights and sounds, and to continue to support faithfully both their troops and their government, while at the same time tempering their desire for vengeance against a cruel enemy. This is an enormous amount to expect from anyone, let alone concerned families and mystified children-even when our nation's cause is just and our methods among the most ethically admirable ever displayed by any armed force.

Worse, the practice of embedding journalists provides our enemy with images that he can prostitute as he likes. Men such as those who currently control Iraq, along with other enemies elsewhere, are unlikely to let the opportunity pass. Already they have made the most, for example, of the sight of a careless Marine hoisting an American flag over Iraqi territory-an image that cannot be erased from the minds of even friendly Muslims. How much greater, then, will the effect of such an image be on a mind already filled with hate? And when an unbalanced member of the 101st Airborne Division attempts to kill his superior officers, what does it matter how we explain his motives? Whatever we say, the pendulum of psychological advantage swings back in favor of our enemy.

The embedded journalist equipped with a video feed is a feature of war more suited to degenerate ancient Rome and its circuses of blood than to a modern, progressive army. Watching actual violence in real time may teach valuable lessons about war, but it spreads fear and eventually inures us to killing. "Embedding," as the name ironically suggests, is more than mere voyeurism: It is the pornography of the battlefield, and in the hands of amoral criminals such as America's current enemies, it will prove enormously and enduringly useful. The images born today will take a long time dying-a fact that has nothing to do with landmark journalism and everything to do with national peril.

By allowing the embedding of journalists, then, our modern army is again embracing medievalism. Our enemy, meanwhile, has used the methods of the Information Age to turn the power of televised images against us. This will not be the last reversal of psychological roles that we experience in this war. When we discover weapons of mass destruction, and when we learn just how willing Saddam's legions are to kill their own merely to gain a temporary advantage, the moral momentum will shift back our way. But embedding has been an unnecessary and foolish experiment; and the sooner we pull the plug on it, the quicker we can go about the final, grueling business of subduing Saddam's minions.

Caleb Carr's The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians (Random House) has been published in a revised and updated edition.

In recent years, the citizens of the United States have been forced to learn too much about such things: the devious uses of everyday objects and natural features; the fragile smallness of the earth. Boundaries of every kind have grown brittle and porous thanks to man's viciousness and his ingenious technology.

At this moment, with humanity splintered into factions by the prospect of a war that is mere hours away, fear seems to motivate every side, to taint every voice. Worst of all, this is not the "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror" of Franklin Roosevelt's first inaugural address, but rather fear born out of a sensible assessment of the facts. And because fear animates all players, the behavior and goals of each have become uniformly negative : Despite President George W. Bush's obviously heartfelt address to the nation Monday night, there is at present no profound, no persuasive voice of genuine hope to be heard; no one can point with conviction to the manifest good that will come either from fighting or from avoiding the battle. There are rationalizers, of course: Every nation and faction has them, from the squabbling Western allies to the pro- and anti-intervention groups. But their ideas are small and hollow, and their diagnoses and prescriptions so unreal and self-serving that they only reveal more plainly the dread that drives them all.

Begin with the squabbling Western allies. France (and Germany and Russia) spied several months ago an opportunity to check sharply the power of the dreaded American hegemon. President Jacques Chirac and his grand vizier of moral and historical revisionism, Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, can try all they like to paint their nation and their government as apostles of peace, but Mr. Chirac's career-long involvement with weapons proliferation-particularly regarding the man he for so long knew as cher Saddam -gives the lie to this effort. Their goal is in fact to frustrate American and British aims in Iraq: a negative tactic, and likely not only to fail, but to degrade seriously their nation's global influence.

America, too, seems doomed to take a negative approach. On Monday, Mr. Bush delivered another urgent warning to Saddam, along with another chronicle of the Iraqi dictator's crimes. Once again he uttered what has become the mantra of U.S. policy, the declaration repeated by every official in his administration: "The time for diplomacy is over." The whimpering attempt to keep American statesmanship alive during the coming conflict-the promulgation of the administration's "road map for Middle Eastern peace"-may be of some use in mitigating the effects of the Iraq war outside the Middle East; or it may make things worse. There is as yet no sign that President Bush has developed the nerve to force concessions from Ariel Sharon (who, tiring of his lifelong hobby of murdering Palestinian refugees during the course of military operations, has now taken to permitting the gruesome slaughter of American civilians who protest his methods), and if the Bush initiative produces only more Israeli intransigence, rage on the Arab street will make Palestinian terrorism in the United States almost a certainty.

Absent diplomacy, America is left with its own set of negative motivations: to disarm, depose and in every way defang the beast of Baghdad. These are valid aims, especially in the light of 9/11 and Saddam's supremely negative efforts not only to defy weapons nonproliferation laws, but to shelter, supply and encourage Islamic terrorists. But none of this changes the fact that we have no well-considered, thorough and positive plan for an adjusted American relationship with the Islamic world generally.

This is not the fault of America's defense planners and warmakers; they are not diplomats, and it is not their job to be diplomatic. The American media-and our troublesome "allies"-have criticized members of our defense establishment for their blunt talk, but their brusqueness is notable only because the State Department has failed to provide a counterbalancing and convincing diplomacy: We have only a void where there should be statesmanship. Our vaunted Secretary of State, Colin Powell, has failed in this as in every recent regard, and this should come as no surprise. Consider his career, from the early whitewashing of the My Lai massacre to his insistence on ending the first Gulf War too early, to his formulation of the much-admired but in fact banal (to say nothing of brutal) Powell doctrine: He is a Pentagon apparatchik , not a statesman. The inverse racism that has thus far spared him from the kind of invective that would have been heaped on James Baker or Madeleine Albright had they been similarly ineffective may well protect him for as long as the Bush administration endures. But the fact remains that American diplomacy during this crisis has consisted of denying Iraqi claims, coercing and bribing allies and neutral nations, and threatening the world with the "end" of a diplomacy that never began.

Even those who most vociferously proclaim themselves "advocates"-the opponents of military action in Iraq-are in fact merely "anti-war."

The movement is laced with intellectually pedestrian (and historically idiotic) negatives: "There is no good war and no bad peace"; "War is the failure of government"; "Pre-emptive war is not legal." Neither these nor any other anti-war slogans address the simple question: If we spare Saddam Hussein, what proactive, assertive policy can the critics of intervention suggest to keep him in check and to prevent terrorist organizations from becoming ferociously emboldened? Saddam will not need to "go back" to producing his pet weapons of mass destruction-because he never stopped producing them. Weapons inspections have been a dismal and dangerous failure for the last 12 years, a fact ignored or denied by anti-war activists-just as most of them ignored, during those same dozen years, the bombardment and starvation of the very Iraqi people they now claim to champion. The anti-war movement has been brought to life not by ideals, but by fear-fear that attacking Iraq will lead to more terrorist assaults on the U.S.

There is no genuine and imaginative advocacy at work in this crisis. Forget the Bush administration's vow-elaborated fancifully by Mr. Bush on Monday night-to make democracy in Iraq the "real" goal of its war: It is a ludicrous attempt at rationalization, as unreal and potentially destructive, in its way, as Osama bin Laden's fantasy of a world ruled by Islamic fundamentalists. What the U.S. is actually doing in Iraq is completing the process it began in Afghanistan: establishing the price to be paid by rogue states that offer haven, funding or encouragement to terrorists. Honestly stated, this is a justifiable-indeed, necessary-action. The eradication of terrorism, root, trunk and branch, is an essentially negative job, and we ought to say so bluntly.

But we also ought to say that the job will not be completed until we have determined what alternative to terrorism we can offer those populations which now nurture terrorists. Wilsonian blather about exporting American democracy will not fit the bill; neither will an expanded program of globalized capitalism and free trade, no matter how fervently American politicians and business executives crave it.

What positive outcome should we strive for? Let the Iraqi population, like that of Afghanistan, construct whatever government it desires, so long as it meets our demand not only to reject but to combat terrorism. We will agree to become the advocates of who they are, rather than of who we wish them to be; and they can go a long way toward allaying the anxieties that are setting Americans at each other's throats. It's not a bad exchange, really-the criminally narcissistic Woodrow Wilson might have disdained it, but it would have appealed, I think, to our nation's greatest conqueror of fear, Franklin Roosevelt.

Caleb Carr's The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians (Random House), has been published in a revised and updated edition.

The term refers to the study not only of the official codes of conduct that govern individual officers and men, but also to the larger philosophical issues and principles that determine how whole armies behave. Military ethics is the strategic counterpart of the tactical discussion of military methods. The fact that civilizations are defined and remembered largely by how they fight would be reason enough for us to follow the current ethical debate (which has been largely ignored by the media); because the debate will have direct impact on the Iraq campaign, the matter is urgent.

Consider the recent remarks of retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Buster Glosson, who was the director of campaign planning for air operations during the first Gulf War-which is to say, one of the principal architects of a scheme that, by virtually ignoring military ethics, did so much to alienate the Iraqi people in the first place. General Glosson has more than once spoken out to declare the Defense Department's plans for the coming invasion "criminal": "It is risking more lives than are necessary," he says-meaning, of course, American lives. General Glosson especially dislikes the idea that the American air campaign may last only a few days. He belongs to the school that favors prolonged, intensive, long-range bombing. The idea here is that the more we hammer areas where enemy troops are concentrated, as well as enemy infrastructure-regardless of attendant civilian casualties-the more likely we are to guarantee low, even negligible casualties among our own troops and thus protect our national interests.

This issue lies at the very heart of the current debate over American military ethics. As we have observed in every conflict since (and including) the Second World War, more long-range (or "strategic") bombing inevitably means more civilian casualties; less bombing may mean more American casualties. Against this brutally simple calculation stands a hard truth overlooked by generations of American military planners: Soldiers, especially in a volunteer army, accept risk as part of their job and are specially equipped to meet it; civilians, on the other hand, are offered neither such choice nor such special equipment. They are, for the most part, defenseless, and will generally show deep gratitude to whatever army or nation recognizes that-and equally deep hatred toward those who do not.

American military ethics have never been particularly refined or humane. As a nation, we tend to think of our security as something that should be maintained by the most expedient means. This attitude, which can be traced all the way back to colonial struggles against Native American tribes, came into its own after the defeat of Germany and Japan, when the American government and military decided it had no choice but to match the unethical behavior of its Communist enemies. One of the postwar era's most influential exponents of such thinking was Brig. Gen. James H. Doolittle, who led the famous American bombing of military and civilian centers in Japan early in World War II. In a 1956 memo to President Dwight Eisenhower concerning global competition with the Soviets, Doolittle declared, "There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of behavior do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of 'fair play' must be reconsidered."

That it was James Doolittle-an Air Force general-who advocated regressive military ethics was neither surprising nor coincidental: It was the Air Force (both in the U.S. and Great Britain) that had lobbied for and carried out the often indiscriminate bombing of civilian centers in Germany and Japan. Many senior officers in both services believed that they could bomb civilians in both nations into withdrawing their support for their rulers, a concept that became known as "strategic bombing." If this idea sounds uncomfortably familiar to us today, it should: Strategic bombing, in nearly every case, was and remains simply another term for that most unethical of belligerent tactics, terrorism.

But as Americans learned on Sept. 11, terrorism-whether perpetrated by national armies or extremist groups-does not break the will of a civilian population; in fact, it only steels that will. (This was something that should have been vividly apparent to the architects of the strategic bombing campaigns of the Second World War. They had seen that the London Blitz only stiffened England's resolve; and later, in Germany, they were faced with another unexpected development: The more bombs dropped on German civilians, the higher the rate of German industrial production, and the wider the range of males enlisting in the German armed forces.)

Until the U.S. launched its campaign to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, strategic bombing remained the default strategy of American military planners. But at the moment when terrorism struck America with unprecedented force on Sept. 11, it was the good fortune of the nation to find the Defense Department under the leadership of someone willing to call received wisdom into question. Donald Rumsfeld did not and still does not seem to many a likely exponent of ethical change. But progress in the realm of military ethics has never been achieved by those righteous individuals-from St. Augustine to Jimmy Carter-who pontificate about the need for moral reform in society and government without addressing pragmatic questions such as national security. Real headway is made by reformers who can demonstrate that their progressive ethics will also augment a nation's safety and well-being.

Immediately on taking control of the Pentagon in early 2001, the new Secretary of Defense put military officers and officials on notice that old modes of behavior, on the battlefield and off, would have to change. Establishing supra-national terrorism and rogue states as the primary threats of the new century, Mr. Rumsfeld also challenged strategic doctrines and weapons programs that had become established tenets and cash cows for many in the department. And, critically, he displayed an understanding that the United States, if it was indeed to continue as the global hegemon, could no longer indulge its worrisome tendency to ignore enemy civilian casualties in an effort to avoid American military casualties.

Yet it was by no means clear early on that Mr. Rumsfeld's reforms would succeed. Indeed, as of Sept. 10, 2001, Washington was rife with rumors that he would be the first member of George W. Bush's cabinet to resign or be fired. The secretary's blunt if jocular style, his intimidating intellectual capacity and finally his command of the ins and outs of Pentagon bureaucracy (one career Special Forces officer who worked for many years in the Pentagon told me that Mr. Rumsfeld's message was received as: "I already know all the ways you're going to bullshit me, so don't even try") combined to create a swell of opposition, not only within the department but also on Capitol Hill and in the President's cabinet.

Mr. Rumsfeld's response to Sept. 11 changed the entire picture. His predictions concerning the kinds of threats that America would face in the new century had been vindicated, and his personal stock with the public skyrocketed when it was learned that he had personally supervised efforts amid the smoldering ruins of the Pentagon's western wing, while the President and other members of the cabinet were scouring the nation for secure locations in which to hide.

Though his job at Defense was now secure, Mr. Rumsfeld encountered continued attempts to undercut his policies by members of the department at the beginning of the campaign to depose the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. He had taken the singularly progressive decision to send Special Forces operatives into the country in advance of the actual campaign so that they could coordinate with anti-Taliban groups, in large part to avoid civilian casualties. And yet for almost the entire first two weeks of the campaign, American military behavior and ethical priorities appeared to revert to the days of Serbia and even Vietnam: Hundreds of high-altitude bombing missions were conducted, and although they often dropped weapons that could be guided to targets marked by the Special Forces operatives, they sometimes did not-and rumors of civilian casualties began to mount.

Realizing where all this was likely heading, Mr. Rumsfeld demanded that the Air Force shift its emphasis to lower-altitude tactical air operations; and he demanded that the role of Special Forces troops be expanded. That he carried the day was due more to his powers of persuasion than to his commander in chief's military acumen; but the important point is that for the first time in American history, the disciples of long-range, nondiscriminatory destruction were checked-and held in check. And for the first time since Korea, American troops were welcomed as a liberating, rather than an occupying, force.

All this grew out of an ethical willingness to weigh the value of the lives of Afghan civilians-on the same scale as the lives of American troops. Yet still, traditional military thinkers protested: One angry officer declared, after the early days of the Afghan undertaking, "It is shocking, the degree to which [concerns about] collateral damage hamstrung the campaign." But in fact, no one involved in this ethical shift ever deliberately compromised the safety of American military personnel or the swift prosecution of the campaign; instead, they demonstrated that avoiding "enemy" civilian casualties actually contributes to the success of American arms in the field and to American national security overall.

One might have thought, with preparations for the invasion of Iraq so far advanced, that the debate over military ethics would have been settled long ago. But the disciples of brute air power, the proponents of "clean" (so far as American troops are concerned) war, are not so easily dispensed with, as General Glosson's remarks about the Pentagon's "criminal" plans indicate. The charge is absurd: The current planning (what we know of it) is intended to gain Iraqi assistance, not to risk American lives: to shorten the war and secure a genuine and lasting piece by eliminating that part of the campaign most likely to produce embittering civilian deaths. It is true that reports continue to surface that the initial air operations of the campaign will be severely curtailed, but the types of weapons used may more than make up for that. America has for some time had in its arsenal more than just bigger and better conventional bombs: We have laser-guided models, as well as JDAM's, which are satellite-guided and more accurate than their laser-guided cousins. Even more importantly, the U.S. now has such ingenious devices as E-bombs. Capable of destroying the electronic circuitry in computers, radios and telephones-and missiles, too-with a massive microwave pulse, E-bombs can obviate the need to demolish entire electric-power plants. Because Saddam Hussein has been known to forcibly position civilians in such installations so that later, after the bombing, he can display the dead bodies, and because the preservation of infrastructure also preserves civilian life during and after the campaign, the development and use of E-bombs and other advanced weapons represents an important step forward in the refinement of American military ethics.

No bomb, however sophisticated, can be guaranteed to minimize civilian casualties on its own: The U.S. must remain willing-in the interests of its own security-to continue to use Special Forces troops to confirm the legitimacy of ground targets. There is every indication that Mr. Rumsfeld intends to do just that.

It is obviously terrible to try to judge the value of the lives of one's own servicemen and -women relative to the lives of enemy civilians. When he declares that protecting enemy civilians must never mean endangering U.S. personnel ("I don't believe there is ever a situation when that is acceptable"), General Glosson displays a typical Air Force hostility toward ethical calculations. The fact that Mr. Rumsfeld and his lieutenants have dared even to approach this horrific dilemma is commendable; and their success to date is most encouraging. But difficult questions remain: Have they tried hard enough? Is their commitment sufficiently strong, or-should the plan for the new Iraq campaign meet with trouble early on-will they join forces with the advocates of long-range destruction?

America is walking the narrowest of paths toward military success. The failure of enlightened ethics-that is, the reintroduction of indiscriminate force-will close down that path altogether, and perhaps bring on the Armageddon of which Saddam Hussein has so often and so delightedly warned. Should that nightmare come, many American officers and officials will doubtless find themselves, like certain of their departed predecessors, in that special hell reserved for those who believe that in order to save a people, one must devastate them first.

Caleb Carr is the author of The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians, an updated edition of which will be published next month by Random House.

The first strategic problem dropped in the laps of our defense chiefs, the decision by the Turkish parliament not to allow the anti-Saddam coalition to base some 62,000 troops along the Iraqi border, has as much to do with prolonged wrangling over how much "foreign aid" the United States would pay for basing rights as it does with any true sense of solidarity with fellow Muslims. It is highly likely that the decision will be reversed, and soon: The Turkish stock market and inflation rate reacted to the news that no new American money would be forthcoming by plummeting and rising, respectively. Then, too, the showy Turkish rejection may have been just that: a very public denial of military and diplomatic prostitution that the Turks felt they needed to make before they could quietly return to the business of pimping their prime resource.

From a strategic point of view, it is by no means necessary that Turkey participate in the campaign. Those who think it is are falling into the trap of linear thinking that has traditionally bedeviled American military leaders, from Ulysses Grant to Dwight Eisenhower and beyond. Linear thinkers believe that to achieve a military objective, one must move one's forces along an unbroken line into enemy territory until that objective is eventually obtained, never allowing fronts to become confused or individual units to get ahead of either their lines of support or their comrades on their flanks-even if a decisive opportunity opens up before them. America's greatest military campaigns have actually defied such morbidly conservative thinking: William Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea during the Civil War made a mockery of it (and nearly destroyed Grant's nervous system in the process), as did the American armored sweep through France in the summer and fall of 1944, which succeeded despite Eisenhower's fears that the tanks were running too far ahead of both his plodding plans and their gas and food supplies. Yet linear thinking has always managed to reassert itself within the American military establishment, and it may well do so again now: The Pentagon is awash in generals as unimaginative as Grant and Eisenhower, men who don't like the kind of risks that were taken in Afghanistan by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his advisers, and who may use a final Turkish refusal as a pretext to declare once again that the progressive planning of their civilian superiors poses an unacceptable hazard, and that the incursion into Iraq should be scrapped if overwhelming (overkilling) force cannot be assembled.

Just as Abraham Lincoln gravitated toward and supported Sherman's unorthodox ideas for breaking the power of the South, so George W. Bush must prevent conservative Pentagon thinkers from overemphasizing the risks of a non-linear assault and ensure that Mr. Rumsfeld retains operational control. It is true that the loss of Turkey as a staging ground will put far more emphasis on the hazardous work of American Special Forces behind Iraqi lines; and it is also true that most of these units will need to be dropped to their initial positions by air-but there are air bases outside Turkey that can serve this purpose, including one concrete field constructed inside the Kurdish-controlled sector of northern Iraq. Even armored units might be airlifted from these other bases-though if our Special Forces and light-infantry units can effectively coordinate with Iraqi opposition forces and anti-Saddam military units, the need to use armor in Iraq may be obviated altogether. American Special Forces have over the years proved enormously self-reliant inside enemy-held territory, even when operating in relatively large formations; and they are certainly capable of being not only transported but resupplied by air. We should remember, in this context, that American tactical control of the skies above Iraq will likely be achieved before, during or very soon after any invasion begins-if, indeed, it has not been already.

Turkey's defection may actually be a blessing in disguise: A smaller number of troops operating in the north-probably fewer than 30,000-will be enough to perform such primary missions as protecting oil fields in the area, but not too many to make the Iraqis worry about the theft of their national integrity. Also, if Turkey refuses to allow the use of its airfields, it will be more difficult to coordinate the kind of blanket bombing campaign that inevitably results in unacceptable levels of civilian casualties-another blessing. And, of course, with Turkey out of the picture, the Bush administration will be $26 billion closer to paying for its war.

As for the second development, the arrest of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed-one of Al Qaeda's chief operations officers and the alleged architect of the Sept. 11 attacks-the event was greeted with more of the media's incurable compulsion to toss around terms like "genius" and "mastermind" when discussing terrorists and their operations. The truth is that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is no more deserving of those epithets than Mohammed Atta, who was also called the "criminal mastermind" behind the 9/11 hijackings. In time it became clear that Atta was in fact a drearily mundane man, possessed of only average intelligence, who had a knack for using that very innocuousness-along with an almost medieval devotion to his mission-to manipulate the modern world's maze of overworked and often incompetent immigration, identification and security bureaucracies. Despite his extraordinary bloodthirstiness, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is only marginally more impressive.

My intention here is not to underestimate our enemy, but to try to understand him better at a moment when terrorist violence, because of the Iraq crisis, is a principal public concern-and when the entire topic of terrorists and terrorism is once again being shamefully sensationalized in the media.

A terrorist need not possess a complex strategic mind or tactical vision. What he does need is vulgar ease with viciousness, and the doggedness required to duel with the brutally dull-witted machinery of today's consumer, information and immigration agencies. The deadliest people in the world today rely on essentially the same tactics that teenagers use to get into bars and crack porn Web sites; they have the same basic level of weapons inventiveness as warring prison inmates, low-level safecrackers and arsonists. It takes neither a mastermind to find the holes in our domestic security-a state of affairs that has dramatically worsened with the ascension of Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge-nor a genius to exploit them.

Why are these points relevant to America's military intentions in Iraq? Because-elementary and archaic as their tactical formulations may be-the drones of Al Qaeda constitute a strong-willed and single-minded weapons-delivery system. Should they get hold of a powerful weapon (a plague of some sort, say-a terror that harks back, like their fundamentalist philosophy, to the Middle Ages), they are smart enough to know that unleashing just one cataclysmic device could well hurl the United States into an economic and social collapse severe enough to erode or destroy our status as global hegemon and force our partial withdrawal-at least temporarily-from much of the business of the international community.

Enter Saddam Hussein, who is eminently capable of recognizing America's vulnerability to this kind of assault. Is Saddam foolish enough to launch an attack himself? By no means; but he is determined to befriend and encourage those who are. He is also canny enough to realize, after decades of unsuccessful conventional wars, that his best opportunity to seize territory from his neighbors is now contingent on the destabilizing violence of terrorism: If terrorism-which is supra-national and thus immune to any policy of containment-can bring the United States to a point of international impotence, he can make another grab at regional hegemony. He has therefore worked over the past decade to tighten his ties not only to average Muslims but to Muslim terrorists-particularly, but not exclusively, Palestinian suicide bombers. At the same time, by spending heavily in weapons and military programs and thus worsening food shortages and delaying infrastructure repair within Iraq, he has aggravated the anti-Western sentiment bred in his own people by the international embargo.

There is simply no way to contain this kind of behavior. Indeed, the cruise missiles and economic sanctions and no-fly zones that were supposed to achieve containment have instead relieved Saddam's former isolation among Muslim leaders and peoples. When containment fosters regional solidarity, it is time to recognize its utter bankruptcy as a strategy.

Those who believe that Saddam would never play the terrorist card-that he is himself too worried about such groups to ever release weapons of mass destruction to them-are simply not listening to his own very plausible analysis of the current crisis. Saddam has repeatedly predicted that "Armageddon" will ensue if the U.S. attacks Iraq. He could be right. If Al Qaeda and others take a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq as the moment to initiate a string of attacks, including setting off a W.M.D., the resulting devastation may be felt far more sharply in America than American bombs will be felt in Iraq. The Iraqis, Saddam believes, have grown inured to American aggression; Americans, on the other hand, will have no idea how to cope with another, even more horrifying attack on their own soil.

How much clearer need it be that for us to ignore the officially unacknowledged but de facto and substantial identification of interests between Saddam and international terrorism, or to speak of regime change in Iraq as distracting or diverting us from the war on terror, is both inaccurate and enormously dangerous? The two efforts-forceful coercion (or elimination) of Saddam and rooting out terrorist cells and leaders-have in fact become part and parcel of the same struggle.

Both Saddam and Osama bin Laden have come grudgingly to a very similar conclusion (making it past time for us to do the same). As Osama himself pointed out in his last audiotaped message, the forging of common cause by the nationalist dictator and the supranational terrorist may be distasteful to the pure soldiers of Al Qaeda, but if it results in the defeat of the primary enemies of Islam, then the faithful must hold their noses and swallow. On Saddam's side, meanwhile, the alliance that dares not speak its name may be fraught with danger. Fundamentalists may see his suddenly rediscovered faith and his ridiculous Mother of All Battles Mosque for the shams they are, and may fully intend to send the Iraqi dictator the way of the Americans once that greater enemy is defeated. But Saddam has never indicated that he considers any person or group within his own part of the world a worthy adversary, and this is likely not a prospect that disturbs his fantasies of himself as the leader of a revived Islamic empire.

We must also remember that Al Qaeda and its fellow terrorist organizations have not yet demonstrated the ability to brew chemical weapons more powerful than ricin (which cannot be used effectively on more than the relatively "limited" scale of, say, a subway car), or the as-yet-unidentified nerve agent or cyanide gas with which several of their courageous warriors in Afghanistan gigglingly poisoned puppies and dogs on a videotape that was discovered after the allied invasion of that country. Nor is it likely that they will ever create anything more powerful, at least on their own: Terrorists in caves and huts using high-school chemistry sets cannot whip up chemical or biological agents of sufficient strength or in sufficient quantities to kill thousands and even millions of people. Indeed, there are relatively few places in the world where such weapons can be created: They include the United States, Russia-and Iraq.

In truth, one thing alone has thus far prevented Saddam from giving Al Qaeda or another terrorist group a W.M.D.: the forceful determination of the United States. That and the suspicion-bred in Saddam's mind by our determination-that the American government would trace any rogue W.M.D. back to him and unleash a punishment so severe that he himself, for all his bunkers and doubles, could not hope to survive it.

This hesitation on the part of the Iraqi leader makes it doubly important that we not allow our resolve to be weakened-not even by last week's third important event: Saddam's sudden declaration that he will not only continue to destroy the full complement of illegal Al Samoud missiles, but will also reveal the location of buried stockpiles of biochemical weapons whose poisonous agents-he claims-are no longer active. Given Saddam's lifetime of deadly duplicity, his last-minute promise offers little real hope for peace. But it does clarify an issue: Saddam has now effectively admitted that for more than 12 years, he has indeed been violating U.N. dictates. The darkest assessment of his character and behavior has been borne out, and his addiction to both mendacity and the development of W.M.D.'s has once again been demonstrated.

Is it really possible that those who oppose military action in Iraq will go on arguing that Saddam can be contained, that he has neither any connection to nor any interest in being connected to international terrorism, and that he does not in fact long for the moment when antiwar sentiment in the West will hobble the determination of his enemies and oblige them to call home the forces arrayed against him, clearing the way for his plans for regional hegemony? The application of enlightened force remains our best and only hope for eradicating these dangers, as well as for limiting the destructiveness of terrorist organizations. Anyone who believes otherwise, anyone who claims or hopes that we can buy ourselves some sort of mercy or indulgence from either Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden by relaxing the diplomacy of force, is blind to the established behavior of both tyrant and terrorist. Take the tragically deluded souls who are currently traveling to Baghdad to become human shields: Delighted with their own righteousness, these would-be ambassadors of peace tour the country and celebrate in hotel rooms, all courtesy of a mass murderer who watches their antics with silent satisfaction, as he mentally tattoos the word "HOSTAGE" across their foolish foreheads. While we should never ignorantly pursue hostilities, we must also avoid coming to terms with an enemy without understanding him. By doing just that, the human shields have committed an almost certainly suicidal error-one that we as a nation must avoid.

Caleb Carr is the author of The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians , an updated edition of which is being published this month by Random House.

I was recently asked by a group of left-leaning intellectuals, academics and artists to lend funds and a signature to a group advertisement in The New York Times -"a very simple statement" of opposition to "the war against Iraq." (Exactly which war against Iraq they meant-the one carried on for eight years by the Clinton administration or the one being planned by President Bush's advisers-the ad's organizers did not specify; but more of such irritating distinctions later.) When I inquired if, in fact, it was not the job of scholars and artists, in a complex situation already overburdened by "very simple statements," to offer more nuanced interpretations, I was met by a very polite stone wall: The effect of the message would only be diluted, said the organizers, by qualifications.

But surely the American public is screamingly weary of such simplicity-both the smirking moral simplicity of President Bush and the childish antiwar movement, which apparently believes the Iraq crisis can be analyzed and addressed with 40-year-old folk songs. Even a nation as characteristically unreceptive to irony as ours has not been deaf to the subtleties, both humorous and tragic, of the moment. (Consider our complicated and often contradictory responses to naïvely simple questions about Iraq.) It is time for the leaders of both factions to start addressing the American public as adults; and above all, it is time for the elucidation of third ways to understand this crisis.

Third ways are not the same as prevarication disguised as solutions, which is what we have been hearing of late at the United Nations. Now we have yet another date for yet another progress report by U.N. weapons inspectors-by which time, it is hoped, Iraq's obfuscation and obstinacy (and one begins to wonder whether Saddam Hussein's capacity for both tactics is not infinite) will be visibly diminished. Should that change not materialize, early March would certainly suit America's more conventional military planners as a jump-off date for invasion: The season is right and the moon is new.

But before this latest campaign gets under way, it is imperative we realize that success for coalition forces will depend not on convincing Iraqi opposition leaders and citizens that our goals have changed (after repeated American betrayals, the people of Iraq have grown understandably numb to lofty statements of objectives by Washington), but rather on demonstrating that our methods have evolved: For it is only by our methods that our true motives will be revealed.

Because almost all sides in the current debate presume that this Gulf War will closely resemble the last, there has been little discussion of the political implications of military methods. But right now, the possibility of a repeat performance is perhaps the greatest danger that Americans face.

In 1990-91, the artless, bludgeoning tactics of Desert Shield and Desert Storm began the process of alienating even friendly Iraqis, and helped limit feasible coalition goals to the liberation of Kuwait. While there was scarcely a member of George H.W. Bush's administration and military team that did not believe that the overthrow of the Iraqi dictator was their additional and greater mission, the methods they chose to employ-emphasizing as they did the often indiscriminate destruction of civilian infrastructures and civilian lives (carefully selected television displays of laser guidance notwithstanding)-so alienated huge numbers of the Iraqi people that the possibility of liberating Baghdad to the accompaniment of a cheering citizenry rapidly devolved into the prospect of a forceful military occupation of the city, the political and economic costs of which were incalculable. Faced with that prospect, the elder Bush abandoned those Iraqis who had been brave enough to respond to his exhortations to rise up against Saddam, leaving them to twist in the harrowing wind that was and remains Saddam's insatiable appetite for vicious revenge, and thus breeding further anti-American hatred.

This betrayal was followed by an embargo that famously punished the Iraqi people without noticeably altering Saddam's ability to build either weapons of mass destruction or palaces and other facilities in which to hide them. Iraq's conflict with the United States and its most staunch allies then moved into a lower-profile, but still deadly and alienating, phase. Bill Clinton's trepidation at the prospect of allowing Special Forces troops or even C.I.A. cowboys to assist the Iraqi opposition inside Iraq, along with his inclination to rain down supposedly surgical missiles and bombs without reliable eyes on the ground to tell him exactly where those weapons should fall, was in many ways as morally indefensible as Bush père 's methods had been. The consequences were entirely predictable. Not only did Saddam's grip on his nation tighten, but the United States was revealed as a country willing to inflict indiscriminate death from great distances and high altitudes in support of its President's moral posturing, but unwilling to risk the life of even one of its soldiers in the same cause. (This impression was underlined by the American air campaign in the former Yugoslavia, where U.S. diplomats and air commanders merrily and falsely announced that they could enforce their will through air power alone; meanwhile, on the ground, civilians died, wrong targets were destroyed, and indigenous opposition groups, along with fretful Russian diplomats, did the dirty work of actually bringing down Slobodan Milosevic.)

Methods, then, have been everything in our conflict with Iraq, as indeed they are in any war: Fast friends can be made into mortal enemies and vice versa, depending on how we choose to fight. That relatively simple lesson (which has been lost on generations of unimaginative American military and political leaders going back to our own Revolution) suddenly became, after the attacks of Sept. 11, something of a new American credo, one that was put to constructive and remarkable use during the campaign to topple the Taliban and cripple the power of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Throughout most of that conflict, the traditional American reliance on indiscriminate, long-range, overwhelming force was finally challenged by officials in a position to bring about change: Mr. Rumsfeld's willingness to risk the lives of American Special Forces and intelligence operatives on the ground before the campaign itself even began represented a radical departure in American military thinking. It was also the crucial phase of the war, during which we earned the trust of anti-Taliban Afghan forces and determined the position of targets that could be destroyed without killing or alienating enormous numbers of Afghan civilians.

We succeeded in Afghanistan not because the fury of American air power was eventually unleashed, but because that fury was (with the exception of several reprehensible examples of Air Force recidivism) discriminate, directed and undertaken in coordination with ground forces. The current Bush administration may have failed to nation-build after the invasion, but when they first arrived, American troops were welcomed by the vast majority of Afghan civilians. No one pretended that the war had been won from the air alone, and Mr. Rumsfeld and his allies in the Pentagon (who had been dismissed as amateurs by the same old-line military bureaucrats who held to the traditional American modus operandi: Level an enemy first and offer the battered survivors a handshake later) emerged as the authors of a new method of American war.

But their achievement was not enough to silence those within the defense establishment and the U.S. Congress who had a philosophical, political and financial stake in the old doctrine of "overwhelming force." Attributed to Pentagon graduate and current steward of American diplomacy Colin Powell, this doctrine has always carried an enormous budgetary price tag (and with it, the promise of equally enormous kickbacks and considerations from weapons contractors). The doctrine is also popular at home, since its primary emphasis is on avoiding American casualties-but it secures that popularity through an obvious willingness to inflict civilian death on the enemy, and that willingness in turn sows deep and lasting hatred of America. After Afghanistan, the desperate attempts of entrenched military interests to protect the Powell Doctrine became apparent during their very public struggles with Mr. Rumsfeld and his advisers over various weapons systems-notably the Crusader self-propelled howitzer-that were emblematic of traditional American military habits.

Weapons like the Crusader, a long-range artillery piece, are of use only to old-school strategies of massed firepower delivered indiscriminately from great distances. (In other words, not a weapon to use if you're worried about civilian casualties.) Last fall, Mr. Rumsfeld declared that if weapons such as the Crusader could not be canceled in favor of increased production of the kind of truly discriminatory weapons that had played such a crucial role in the success of the Afghan campaign (for example, the once obscure but now legendary Predator unmanned aerial drone), no systematic reform of either the behavior of U.S. forces in the field or the fabled American military-industrial complex would be possible. He was not overstating the case. All along the weapons pipeline, there remain influential people who are less concerned with the diplomatic and political impact of military methods than with perpetuating a system that allows them to profit from building-but rarely using-overwhelming forces.

The question of what methods will be used in our coming action in Iraq represents yet another, perhaps decisive, round in this ongoing struggle to determine how America projects its power abroad-and how it is perceived as projecting that power. The costs of any retreat by Mr. Rumsfeld and his faction, or of any failure on the part of President Bush to back to the hilt his Secretary of Defense and all other progressive military thinkers, will be high, indeed-higher even than they would have been in Afghanistan. Further victimization and alienation of the Iraqi people by wrongheaded American methods will certainly inspire new terrorist activity, whereas a campaign that is quickly identified by Iraqis and other Muslim observers as designed to spare civilian life-a campaign that looks like a joint effort to depose a tyrant-will steal much thunder from demagogues like Osama bin Laden, just as the forward-thinking victory in Afghanistan did.

We must not expect that such a victory will prevent all terrorist responses; nothing as yet can. But a successful, progressive campaign will reduce their probability-and end the very real danger that Saddam will funnel his W.M.D.'s to terrorist organizations. It will also reveal the United States not as the leader of a new crusade against Islam, but as a consistent crusader against tyranny.

Will we, in fact, wage such a campaign in the days to come? Are our leaders preparing for Afghanistan II, or Desert Storm II? The signs are various and not definitively indicative (as indeed they should not be, at this point, to outsiders). We know, for instance, that American Special Forces units are already at work inside Iraq; but what precisely they are doing only they and their commanders know. Are they sowing trust and arranging coordination with the Iraqi people and opposition leaders, or simply scouting territory and painting a broad range of targets for an indiscriminate allied assault? Will the armada and military units being assembled around Iraq actually be used to their full, overwhelming strength, or will only those elements required to topple Saddam's regime enter the country, leaving the rest to play the part that they have thus far carried off admirably: that of the force behind forceful diplomacy?

On the question of military methods hangs the fate of many American servicemen and servicewomen and countless Iraqis. At stake, as well, are the legitimacy of American foreign policy in the immediate term; the success of the war on terror; the well-being of the American economy-and possibly the lives of many civilians here at home.

Caleb Carr is the author of The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians , an updated edition of which will be published next month by Random House.