Wham, bam, thanks Saddam; sorry for the mess we left behind.

• Author: Boo, Katherine
• Position: Saddam Hussein, Persian Gulf War

Katherine Boo is an editor of The Washington Monthly. Research assistance was provided by Deborah Yavelak Sieff.

The headless corpse of one of the [Iraqi] soldiers was on its back a short distance from the truck. Another body was wedged inside the engine compartment. Two more lay face up in the bed of the truck, their feet sticking grotesquely over the side.

-The Washington Post, March 3

As the ground war drew neatly to its close, it seemed the most perverse and peripheral of causes: a group of left-leaning reporters suing the government in federal court to open Dover Air Force Base to the public. They wanted us to see the body bags roll in. And in that desire, they were remarkably alone.

Just after the luckless plaintiffs lost the first court battle, the war in the Gulf was over, the issue all but moot. Yet, in a way, no episode better signifies the distance we've come since Vietnam. This time, we have no time for body bags. We're in love with the splendid little war.

A few years ago, prophets like John Mueller and Francis Fukuyama proclaimed that, in the future, first-world nations, obsessed with their economies, would recoil from costly warfare. Today, Americans bear witness to the other extreme: a renewed faith in the power of the short, clean war-restorative, affordable, and preferably a few thousand zip codes away. It's a faith at least as old as Agamemnon, who believed Priam's city would be captured in a day. Yet as American troops suit up to become the world's policemen, historical parallels should make us a little nervous. "Fool," chided Homer, "who knew nothing of all the things Zeus planned to accomplish." From Troy to Tel Aviv, Berlin to Baghdad, leaders' faith in short, clean wars has wreaked havoc on humanity. In the midst of the revelry, one couldn't help remember the s ate of brisk little conflicts-the Schleswig-Holstein, the Franco-Prussian, the Seven Weeks War-that convinced Kaiser Wilhelm that every modern war might be resolved in a matter of months. So in August 1914, he waved his troops off at Berlin Station, promising they'd be home before the autumn leaves fell. I guess we could probably [estimate Iraqi casualties] if we really tried hard, but we don't really have that requirement.

-Brig. General Richard Neal, February 9

Politicians, particularly, have had a hard time resisting the appeal of clean and easy wars; you could stock a dissertation with hapless folks like the Alabama congressman who in 1861 volunteered his handkerchief to mop up all the blood that would be spilled for Confederate independence. Still, most leaders have been unable to forego the optimistic forecast, for obvious reason. Effective war-making depends not just on military and administrative rowess, but on widespread public support, as Clausewitz pointed out two centuries ago. And clean wars are the easiest sell-a truth Saddam Hussein himself understands. He started his war against Iran by promising his people a brief, decisive blitzkrieg. By war's end eight years later, there were 200,000 fewer Iraqis to remember that empty promise.

In the wake of Vietnam, the courting of public support for American warfare has become a virtual religion-one that includes such odd rites as open letters from the president to campus newspapers, pleading just cause. "Media campaigns...