That America will eventually control all of Iraq seems certain, though we are only beginning to discover what that control will entail in terms of costs and responsibilities. For the moment, the war in Iraq serves as a textbook illustration of the reality, never sufficiently acknowledged, that no war is ever really won.

If that seems the statement of a wild-eyed pacifist, let us examine some wars of the American experience. The North won the Civil War, but the cost was the instatement of what might fairly be called the American Terror, as Southern whites (with Northern collaboration) wreaked a century of vengeance on former slaves and their descendants. The U.S. and its allies won World War II, but in its aftermath - in fulfillment of one of the greatest fears of the nation's founders - America saddled itself with the expense and danger of a standing army, a burden we seem unlikely ever to discharge. We are still incurring the costs of the Vietnam War, counted not just in the numbers of those long dead but in the psychological trauma and dislocation experienced by Americans and Southeast Asians alike.

I am not making an argument against war but for an honest acknowledgment of its costs, at home as well as abroad, on the part of those who advocate it. A student of mine, a gentle bear of a guy, told me how he was grateful that he hadn't enlisted in the National Guard as a means of paying for his education, since the unit to which he had been assigned had been called up for service. "In the whole recruiting process, nobody once mentioned I might get sent to war," he said. A moment later he complained about how painful it was to fuel his monster truck - "$60 to fill the tank." I was astonished and discouraged to find that my reasonably intelligent student could not make the connection between someone else's service in Iraq and his access to cheap gas.

So many who are going to war now have so poor an understanding of why they are there and what is at stake. Barely out of their teens, they are products of a system - I teach in it, I know it well - that sees education as preparation for a trade rather than as a means of developing the analytical and critical skills that might lead these young men and women to evaluate their decisions differently. They have never experienced, nor have we taken pains to teach, the domestic legacy of war: the bitterness and anger that divide parent from child, brother from sister, friend from friend; the enduring economic, social and political costs.

I believe in the necessity of collectively embraced discipline - I often teach William James' timeless essay "The Moral Equivalent of War," in which he argues that our biological makeup requires that we find peaceful means to discipline energies that otherwise inevitably give rise to war. "A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy," James writes.

But we at home have not been called to discipline. On the contrary, shortly after 9/11 President George W. Bush committed himself to an unfettered pleasure economy, declaring that changes in the American lifestyle were not an option. He has not sought our collective commitment to this war by asking us to sacrifice to support it; instead he proposes a tax cut to benefit the already-prosperous.

As any parent knows, we teach more by what we do than by what we say, and through the war in Iraq we are teaching several lessons in the most emphatic way. We are teaching that might makes right, and that aggression and violence are acceptable means to getting what we want. We are teaching that the good will and support of longtime allies is of no consequence when it conflicts with our military and economic ambitions. We are teaching that the "unfettered pleasure economy," with all its social and environmental consequences, is worth death, destruction and suffering.

In my recent, extensive visits to American Buddhist monasteries, the young people with whom I spoke told me that they had been initially attracted not by Buddhist practice but by the notion of a collective of people committed to living out an ideal. The military offers such an environment, and those young people who seek it out deserve our praise for searching for a way to give rather than merely receive. That we, their elders, can offer only a war machine as a means for the fulfillment of that desire is evidence of a profound failure.

Long ago I visited an exhibit of Persian miniatures. Executed with a brush containing a single hair, the paintings were infinitesimally small - each display case came accompanied by a magnifying glass. In my favorite, a king on horseback returns victorious from foreign wars to find his castle little more than a pile of rubble. Owls - the birds of wisdom - roost in every crumbling tower, and every stone and branch bears the cunningly executed face of the spirit who inhabits it. With one voice the landscape speaks to the leader: While you were away, your kingdom has fallen into ruin.

That kingdom is our kingdom, and only a new discipline, composed of frugality born of love, can rescue it from its fate.

Fenton Johnson, author of "Keeping Faith: A Skeptic's Journey," is on the creative writing faculty at the University of Arizona.

Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.

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