Fighting Fair and Foul: 'Asymmetrical warfare' in the Land of Saddam.

We feed and heal Iraqi prisoners; they shoot ours -- and sometimes their own who surrender. NBC and CNN reporters hector coalition generals in public press conferences; Ba'athist officers run coerced televised interrogations of our captured soldiers. American planes seek to avoid bombing civilians; Saddam Hussein uses them to shield his military targets. Our bombs are deliberately programmed to miss non- military targets; Iraqi silkworm missiles are launched indiscriminately into Kuwait City. We wear chemical-protection vests; the Republican Guard does not -- secure in the knowledge that we will not do what they would. Our soldiers are careful to respect the lives of those surrendering; Iraqi irregulars feign submission to shoot their would-be captors. Marine checkpoints are designed to allow civilians to navigate the battle lines; Iraqi suicide taxis are used to blow apart the Marine sentries. What is going on?

Such asymmetrical notions of a "fair fight" derive not just from an invader's confidence in its overwhelming military superiority versus a defender's desperation and impotence, but also from conflicting philosophies of war.

Coalition soldiers draw on an entirely different tradition of what armies can and cannot do. Where do these sometimes frustrating restrictions on our warmaking come from? The ancients believed that warfare was inherent in the human experience. Rather than undertaking the impossible and naive task of outlawing conflict, they preferred to moderate the inevitable bloodletting -- in hopes that civilians and soldiers alike could count on some common humanity in the chaos of killing.

This legal and secular idea of "Rules of War" is an original Western concept that began with the Greeks' efforts to define the way soldiers should fight. Indeed, almost all of the military's present notions of moral warmaking -- formal declaration and cessation of hostilities, armistices, treaties, respect for noncombatants, and the prohibitions of particularly odious weapons -- derive from the Greeks and Romans. Sophocles' Antigone, for example, rebelled against Creon's edicts to leave her slain brother unburied on the grounds that such an outrage violated "the Laws of the Greeks," which sought in addition to protect prisoners, heralds, and the sanctity of religious sites and civilian centers. While such protocols were often ignored or broken -- especially during the 27-year-long Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta -- they still provided the foundations for everything from the Christian principle of jus in bello ("just war") to the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War adopted in 1949.

The evolution in moral thinking about the conduct of soldiers has accelerated in Western societies in the last few decades, partly as a result of the horrors of the 20th century, partly as a reflection of a vast, affluent consumer class that assumes a level of civility, security, and sheer comfort not dreamed of by earlier generations. Thus, revelations of occasional battlefield atrocities on the part of GIs in Korea or Vietnam convulsed American society in a manner that did not arise during the savage -- and sometimes more macabre -- island fighting of the Pacific theater in World War II.

How do such deeply entrenched ideas about war's proper conduct affect our soldiers in the field? Do they limit the military's daily efficacy or long-term operations? In the short term, yes; over the long haul, not necessarily. We have already suffered dozens of casualties due to our reluctance to shoot Ba'athist terrorists in civilian clothes or to pulverize deadly Republican Guard tanks parked at hospitals. That being said, the other half of the equation to the Western way of war -- that is, our singular ability to kill the enemy -- is actually enhanced by such rules and protocols, which tend to allow overwhelming force to be unleashed without restraint against recognized combatants.

Ironically, the existence of such protocols has not always ameliorated the brutality of war. Westerners, it seems, if war was ratified by a representative government, if the enemy was notified that a state of war existed, if men in uniform attacked in a "fair ...