Not only have we failed to study and understand a lot of ruthless tactical brilliance over the past half century, we have also discounted the proliferation and perfection of new strategically destructive means. Although weapons of mass destruction have long worried us, more labor-intensive lesser forms--like amputation, rape and mutilation--really have not. We have dismissed these acts as atavistic behavior of no real strategic significance. We did not see that such forms of destructiveness signified a new logic. We forgot that, thanks to conquest, the vanquished often survived--even if to be enslaved, sold or made to pay tribute. With the death of conquest, that is no longer possible. The unforeseen consequence? Enemies, targeted populations, victims--all might as well be considered of no use, so why not just abuse or eliminate them?

Couple this change with the fact that novel destructive forces, once unleashed, are extremely difficult to rein in, and we suddenly recognize a series of spiraling dangers before us that are much harder to reverse than any associated with conquest. As it is, halting conquest took us two world wars and a cold war to achieve. To do so required us to outwit, outproduce and outlast any that opposed us. Industry, technology, science and ingenuity were our strong suits; and moral argument our idiom. But now what do we do? How do we redeem child soldiers or glue suicide bombers back together? How do we stop this ever more threatening and demonic learning curve?

Worse than just being up against Al-Qaeda and other extremists, we are up against "progress" of a most pernicious sort. Al-Qaeda has managed to marry the local to the global better than any other anti-Western movement so far, and not just in technological and organizational terms, but ideologically as well. Islam is Osama bin Laden's ideological weapon of choice as he urges the umma of the world to unite. But he wields Islam not to conquer or subjugate, or even to convert--the uses to which Islam has historically been put--but to utterly destroy. Al-Qaeda has adopted our opposition to conquest and pushed it to its logical conclusion: can't conquer, so kill.

Al-Qaeda mimics our very nature, as well. The West, and the United States, is at once everywhere in the world and nowhere. Our culture and general influence are pervasive, even though no centralized effort has (or can) be made to order, control or directly manage that influence. Turning the tables on us, Al-Qaeda also strives to be everywhere in the world and nowhere. It is everywhere that members of the transnational umma live and plot, and it is nowhere in the sense of having--after the fall of the Taliban--as low-profile a logistical center as possible. Yet its aims represent a radical twist. Freed from the difficulties attendant on fighting to subdue, never mind subjugate, it can concentrate instead on causing unrecoverable collapse and destruction.

Not only does the structural logic to Al-Qaeda's aims and methods grow directly out of the death of conquest, but we have inadvertently handed our opponents a number of advantages while hamstringing ourselves. We have done this, first, by advertising, pre-emptively as it were, what we will not do: fight to conquer. Second, by refusing to directly control anyone or any place, we free people to do things that we then lack the physical presence to stop.

The most glaring (and grating) example of this at the moment is Saddam Hussein. He would not now be developing weapons of mass destruction had we taken over--never mind invaded--Iraq a decade ago. Nor does it matter whether--strategically, tactically or even logistically speaking--we could have done this at such a distance from the United States. The fact that we never even considered such an option, and can still barely bring ourselves to do so, reflects a shift in how we think about power--and it illustrates the extent to which we have unwittingly boxed ourselves in. Up until fifty years ago, humans who generated power did so in order to be able to coerce others, whether pre-emptively or defensively. Now it is all we can do to exert even temporary control. Instead, we seek out locals to trust--like a Marcos or a Mobutu, a Pahlavi or a Karzai. We no longer just fight (sometimes) with a vengeance, we subsequently delegate with a vengeance.

On a certain level, this aversion to exerting ourselves is what some iconoclastic historians, strategists and pundits rail against when they tell us that our leaders should adopt the warrior politics of the ancient Greeks and Romans, or that we should behave more like an empire in order to make the world safe for the civilization we represent. They would have us act. Yet, in addition to misreading significant differences between then and now--should we revive slavery, too?--curiously, none promotes a return to village-by-village conquest, or systematically fighting until every community in our path sues for peace. This is how empires used to be established and maintained.

In part, this lapse in not connecting control to physical conquest must be because we no longer wage war that way; air supremacy obviates the need for slow, grinding, old-fashioned land campaigns. With speed, too, we do less damage. (Never mind that less damage done over longer periods helps convince people to adopt new ways of resistance.) We increasingly believe, too, that all we need do is remove megalomaniacal leaders and their populations will reform themselves after our image of what good governments and healthy societies should be.

There is even a school of thought that considers the significance of territory itself to be passé. But this school misunderstands something that is of the essence. Wars of conquest in the past were rarely fought over territory or resources as such. Conquest was about taking people and doing something with them; one usually aggrandized for the sake of supporters or to gain more subjects, or both. That is what used to define imperialism. We reject that approach, of course, but we may soon be forced to reconsider it. That is because it may turn out that fighting to own, and not just to win, may be the only way to secure effective control in many cases, and to truly turn hearts and minds away from gratuitous destruction and depopulation. Think back to any of our lengthy military engagements over the past century. In how many of these did we take and hold ground? How many can be considered unqualified successes? The answers to these questions tend to run parallel, and with all due respect for the impresarios of novelty among us, this is probably not a coincidence.

What can we do, then, now that we have not only rendered conquest institutionally impossible, but made being conquered unacceptable for others, as well? One thing we need to do is rethink again the nature of our military capabilities, those of our army in particular.

No matter how much reconfiguring has been done since the end of the Cold War, all armies remain institutionally geared for conquest. This, after all, is what they were designed to do--to pursue and thwart hostile territorial takeovers. Small wonder, then, that between the end of the Cold War and the onset of the war on terrorism, the U.S. Army found itself unsure of its role. Most of what it was tasked to do were military operations other than war. Even so, its parts were never substantively re-arranged, nor has any of the new technology adopted since 1991 caused it to change its fundamental orientation. Its design still predisposes it to excel at taking and holding ground.

That is the first irony we confront. The second is that when it comes to being able to squelch others' desire for autonomy or liberation--especially autonomy and liberation from us--what could a successfully reformed army do then? Not much. Thus, as we try to transform a force that actually knows how to conquer and subjugate into a force that can do less clear-cut, nobler and even harder things, we may be heading in exactly the wrong direction. To root out and obliterate our enemies, and to subdue and re-orient their supporters, may well require the kind of thorough military approach, permanent control and reconstruction of society from the ground up that we have consigned to history.

So here the Western world is, having forsworn military conquest, and having made conquest by military means an impossible war aim for anyone else. What a tremendous achievement. It is revolutionary. But the attendant consequences--child soldiers, suicide bombers, ethnic cleansing, addressless terrorism--are revolutionary, too, and where they are leading us is not entirely within our control. This should give us pause, for how we might reconcile our anti-conquest ideals with such realities remains to be seen.