"however technically hyper-advanced"

Let's hear from the Devil's advocate, shall we?

Military power, however technically hyper-advanced, can never be relied on as sufficient, on its own, to assure the achievement of strategic goals. Other elements of power including diplomatic/political smarts and international legitimacy, are equally or even more important.

The conclusion drawn is far wider than the evidence warrants. No heap of contrary examples can establish such a never as that one, and history reinforces what logic preaches, pointing out that only the particular (sort of) "strategic goals" that our invasionites have tried and failed to advance with organized violence have been discredited. Had they chosen their ends more judiciously, who can say with assurance that their favorite means -- "Amazing Force, how sweet the sound!" -- might not have been quite successful?

Especially as regards the former Iraq, what the heck were their strategic goals, anyway? We've heard a long list of different rationales that is scarcely coherent taken as a whole, to phrase the point politely. As an academic exercise, though, one could single out Rationale Number One as a vindication of force, if only it had stood alone: they really did manage to make quite sure that Saddam had no such terror-tipped forty-five-minute specials as Mr. Blair was worried about, did they not? Unless there exists some overriding absolute reason that they could not possibly have stopped there and sought nothing additional -- and I can't think of one myself that isn't rather a moralistic condemnation of lawless aggressors than a technical assessment of their politics and diplomacy and war-making -- couldn't one say with a straight face that military power might have been relied on as sufficient, on its own, to assure the achievement of that one particular strategic goal?

I.e., "How if they'd been ungentlemanly enough to quit gambling as soon as they were ahead?"

The question is especially to the point if one supposes that these perpetrators have already slated the Islamic Republic of Iran for their next excellent adventure. (I'm not sure about that alleged fact either way myself.) The idea of an additional invasion and occupation and counterinsurgency is so out of the question that even at darkest Castle Cheney reality seems to be reluctantly acknowledged, yet how about -- as has been rumoured in the UK press -- three days of bombing everything bombable in sight and leaving it at that, without serious regard to what the human ants scurrying around thirty thousand feet below do or don't do after their anthill is kicked, so long as it doesn't harm the anthill-kickers themselves too much? If the Anthill Kicker Party do try it on again, everything beyond Rationale Number One in the ex-Iraqi case would be ruled out in advance, yet unfortunately that was the one rationale that might be adduced to show that "Force Works!" -- and the condition of its adducability was precisely that it should have been the one-and-only rationale, as everybody seems to agree in advance would be the case in Iran!

Isn't that rather alarming, really? Like it or not, "to make quite sure that the mad mullahs do not now have (and, if possible, that they can never in future obtain) any nukes" is a genuine Strategic Objective as far as I can determine: is that not the very sort of thing that Hermann Kahn and Dr. Strangelove and Mr. Kissinger of Harvard used to grand-strategize about in all those elegant tertiary-educational Cold War scenarios that very happily never happened?

Yet perhaps we should make some additional distinctions here, say between ordinary Amazing Force and "Superforce" or between, say, "hyperstrategic objectives" as opposed to merely strategic ones? To the extent that I can follow why my geopolitical betters of 2007 usually discuss more in PowerPoint than in English, something like that distinction appears to be made. "Superforce" might have been anticipated to be even more shocking and awe-inspiring and amazing than mere old-fashioned -- so-called "conventional" -- Force, yet this seems not to be the case at all. It rather looks as if "Superforce" can only be deployed defensively: it makes one's own anthill unkickable, no doubt, at least assuming non-insane wannabe kickers, but Hiroshima and Nagasaki appear in retrospect to have been the start and end of its offensive accomplishments. Happily for forcemongers, though, just plain Force is still available both for offense and defense, so in many ways the world wags merrily on as usual just as if "Superforce" had never been invented at all. Superforce-equipped MacNamarans and Kissingerites can still "lose" outlying imperial provinces to a very inferior North Vietnam, for instance.

Indeed a whole dubious mystique of Subforce, let's call it -- insurgency, guerilla, maquis, muqáwama, "resistance," "terrorism" -- has developed since 1945 according to which Bambi always beats Godzilla in the end precisely because -- somehow -- she is incomparably (or rather "asymmetrically") weaker than her wannabe predator. The exact precise details of that "somehow" elude me almost as much as Imperial Godzillan PowerPoint-Think does, I fear. But maybe that's just me, obscurely feeling that some attempt to wag me by my supposed underdog sympathies is being attempted? More intellectually, the neoteric devotees of Subforce may even hope to diddle you and me, Mr. Bones, that their own product is scarcely distinguishable from Gandhio-Quakerite nonviolence and unconditional pacificism, little knowing that we have always M. Pascal with us in spirit -- travaillons donc à bien penser! -- to frustrate all such knavish tricks! Though subdued, Amazing Force remains force still, however craftily prefixed this side of flat-out "un-" or "non-." Bambi could be a thuggess, Mr. Bones, and often enough nowadays she really is.

The automatic flip-side of that is that Imperial PowerPointed Godzilla could be a non-thug, an inference I should myself much reluct to draw. The reluctance seems to me theoretically defensible, in that Godzilla is One (or at least Few, if you count Brit poodles and other even more lightweight "coalition pardners"), whereas Bambis are many and scattered and diverse. We know lots and lots about Godzilla, indeed, everybody human knows lots and lots about Godzilla, far more than any such global commonality knows about any one particular Bambi. Godzilla's well attested career in the world is common knowledge, though of course there is no universal agreement about whether such a career as that one is to be accounted thuggish or not. Securus judicat Orbis Terrârum!, Mr. Bones. We may safely leave it to O.T. to decide about Godzilla, and confine ourselves, as usual, to more marginal and parochial litigations.

Or to amateur tertiary-academic speculations, such as wondering what would happen if the neomythology of Subforce ever came to widely accepted. "Divide and conquer" has always up to now been accounted a prime arcanum imperii, but it would go out the window at once like an oblongus pie in Subforce World: to divide the Bambis would only make them weaker and therefore more formidable and likely to prevail at last. Clearly the thing that Imperial Godzilla ought to do, on the supposition that Subforce World significantly resembles Planet Earth, is to attempt to unite the Bambis! And up to a point that's what they've been doing in their Party's semiconquered provinces of Mesopotamia, is it not? Who (short of Dr. Righteous Virtue, a strictly isolated case) barks and bellows more fiercely for the Impresciptible Unity of the former Iraq than the Godzilla fans bellow and bark! Perhaps in a way this is only a backhanded tactical divide et imperâ after all, then? "Throw all the hate groups in one pot," as our own late Governor Edward King, successor to Governor John Winthrop, him of the "City on a Hill," once phrased it, and then the innocent Bambis will be so busy stinging one another like scorpions that they won't much notice Godzilla the tertius gaudens and his Responsible Nonwithdrawal.

But no, O Bones, that's only cheapjack Mu’ámara Junction baloney after all. The real Godzilla Fan Club is far from being able to come up with any tactical scheme so nifty as that one! They really just want exactly what they say they just want, for their neo-liberated indigs to please stop quarrelin' and unite in unanimous -- or at least tolerably harmonious -- choruses of Alleluia to Rancho Crawford and Château Kennebunkport and Castle Cheney ever after.

"Fat chance!," one instinctively says, but come along, sir, is "Fat chance!" an argument?

(And God knows even better!)