The waning Greek city-states attempted valiantly – but more often tragically – to incorporate new methods of fighting, even though they were antithetical to the old amateur hoplite battle and the traditional etiquette of agrarian warfare. Nostalgia about the old ways continued, but political leaders were forced to confront the new military realities. ‘Nothing’, the orator Demosthenes warned his fourth-century BC audience of complacent Athenians, ‘has been more revolutionized and improved than the art of war.’ ‘I know that in the old times’, he continued, ‘the Spartans, like everyone else, would devote four or five months in the summer to invading and ravaging the enemy's territory with hoplites and citizen militia, and then would go home again. And they were so old-fashioned – or such good citizens – that they never used money to buy advantage from anyone, but their fighting was fair and open.’

Incredibly enough, in the third century BC, Rome expanded simultaneously eastwards against the Greeks and Macedonians and west and south against Carthage, the great commercial and military power that had grown out of a Phoenician colony in present-day Tunisia. The three Punic wars (264–241 BC, for Sicily; 218–201 BC, for Italy and Spain; and 149–146 BC, for Carthage itself) were a struggle for the central Mediterranean which culminated in the abject destruction of Carthage. Throughout these conflicts, superior Roman military organization and infrastructure repeatedly demonstrated that the smallholders who made up the legions – as long as they fought in or near Italy – could overcome poor generalship and poor tactics, winning wars even when they lost major battles.

At the beginning of the third millennium BC, the success of intensive, irrigated agriculture on the plains of Egypt and the Near East changed the culture of organized war-making, which had previously consisted of small skirmishes between rival groups of nomadic tribesmen. Hydraulic projects, enhanced agronomic techniques, and planned economies at Sumer, Ur, Babylon, Assur, Nimrud, and Egypt created the necessary capital to support armies, logistics, and fortifications.

Whatever the results of the elections scheduled for late January in Iraq, a new pessimism about that country, as well as about the larger war on terror, has taken hold in many circles in the United States. Serious observers, not to mention shriller commentators like Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, have concluded not only that the United States is stuck in a hopeless quagmire in Iraq, but that our unwise unilateral intervention there is having painful repercussions both for our position as an honest promoter of reform and for our diplomatic and military maneuverability elsewhere in the world.

Joining the pessimism, Alistair Horne, the eminent British military historian, recently likened the American situation in Iraq to the French debacle in the “brutal Algerian eight-year war”; his obvious inference was that the ultimate denouement will be a similarly abrupt and humiliating Western withdrawal. Horne could adduce much apparent evidence to support this depressing proposition: the instability in the Sunni triangle over the last two years, mounting American combat fatalities, a seemingly endless insurgency, the increasing reluctance of allies to support in any serious material way the world's lone superpower, and a failure of moderate Iraqis to step forward and deny sanctuary to the terrorists in their midst. The more jihadists, Baathists, and mujahideen that Americans kill, the more of them have seemed to pour into Iraq from Syria and other places in the neighboring Islamic world, either for pay or out of religious zeal.

On november 21, 2003, some minor rocket attacks on the Iraqi oil ministry and on two hotels in Baghdad elicited an exceptional amount of attention in the global media. What drew the interest of journalists were the terrorists' mobile launchers: they were crude donkey carts.

This peculiar juxtaposition of 8th- and 21st-century technology was taken as emblematic of the entire American experience in Iraq – an increasingly hopeless clash between our overwhelming conventional strength and stealthy terrorists able to turn our own lethal means against us with cheap and ubiquitous native materials. How could we possibly win this contest, when an illiterate thug with a rusty RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) launcher could take down a West Point graduate along with his million-dollar Black Hawk helicopter while those upon whom we have been lavishing our aid cheered our deaths and ransacked the corpses?

In an extensive, on-the-ground account of the post-bellum chaos, George Packer in a recent issue of the New Yorker lists an array of missteps that brought us to this sorry pass. We put too much trust in exiled Iraqis; we allowed looters and fundamentalists to seize the initiative right after the war; we underestimated both the damage done to the infrastructure by Saddam Hussein and the pernicious and still insidious effects of his murderous, Soviet-style government hierarchy. Mark Danner, in the New York Review of Books, relates much the same story, emphasizing our tolerance of looting and our disbanding of the Iraqi army as factors contributing in tandem to the creation of the Iraqi resistance, now thriving on a combination of plentiful cash (from looting and prewar caches) and a surplus of weaponry and manpower (from the defunct army).