But the more pertinent question is what we will take away from these two exercises about the business of fighting wars. Putting aside the question of whether invading Iraq was necessary, both wars might have been fought quite differently from the way they were, in a way that took the loser's acceptance less for granted and therefore was considerably more ruthless about achieving it.

Fighting that way certainly would have exacted a stiffer price up front, from us and from those we invaded. It is at least possible, though, that the price might still have been cheaper than the one we could end up paying in the long run.

Soldiers know that, and it is in large part that knowledge that feeds their much-criticized preference for employing overwhelming force from the outset. The motivation is not simply to avoid defeat. It is also to avoid what Shaara's Scott called "winning badly."

For their part, those who object to overwhelming force routinely fail to connect its price to producing the acceptance of defeat that alone can deter what may be even greater costs, or worse, still another war.

We have chosen to fight this battle in the most difficult way, trading greater costs to our nation and our troops for the chance at rebuilding a free Iraq without obliterating a good proportion of the population. This has never been done before. Naturally, the administration and the military get no credit at all for this.

We know what it takes to make an enemy accept defeat. We bombed Germany into rubble. We dropped two atomic weapons on Japan, after firebombing Tokyo. Please look up the civilian deaths in both nations. Is this a fair trade for not having a couple of hundred of our troops shot afterwards? That's a real question, not a rhetorical one.

This approach would have worked in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nobody would be shooting at us now if we had chased down and massacred the fleeing armies. Nobody would be firing mortars at us if we flattened the villages the mortars were fired from. If we had not cared if our enemy was hiding behind civilians, our enemies would be dead. We could have killed Saddam the first night...with a much, much bigger bomb.

Nobody would be doing anything to us if the response to attack was a fission bomb on a major city. A megaton on Tikrit, and the clear message: we have thousands of these. You decide how it's going to be.

A guerilla who threatened Americans after that would be torn apart by other Iraqis.

Is this "winning well?" Crime has been shown to be largely eliminated in nations where suspected criminals are shot without further ado. Is that how you want it to work?

Again, I hear a lot of bitching. What I have yet to hear is a better idea, other than leave tyrants alone until it's too late.