Forget hearts and minds, this war is about hats and resumes.

Just as I was about to give up all hope of ever figuring out why our occupation of Iraq isn't working, Time magazine last week stepped in to save the day. In the Nov. 24 issue, legendary columnist Joe Klein?best known as the temporarily anonymous author of the temporarily sensational Primary Colors?informs us that the reason things aren't going so rosily over there is that our fighting force is insufficiently dashing:

We may now be at the beginning of a protracted global contest against Islamic radicalism, a conflict that will require more subtlety and sophistication than the planning for the occupation of Iraq. At a similar moment, in the 1960s, when the front lines of the cold war had spread from Germany to the Congo and Vietnam, John F. Kennedy announced his support for an augmented counterinsurgency Force?and gave those soldiers real panache by allowing them to wear headgear frowned upon by the traditional military: green berets.

The entire army wears berets now, and there's a lesson in that.

So that's the problem! We lack panache!

Klein makes a good point, of course. Without Kennedy's brilliant innovation, we might never have won the Vietnam War. While it is true that we were beaten on the field of battle there by a gang of rice-eating midgets in pajamas, in the arena that matters?haute couture?we were the clear victors. The communists may have won Saigon and Haiphong, but what is that compared to Milan and Paris?

Klein's argument, of course, is not that mere fashion superiority will lead to victory in Iraq. What he is trying to say is that creating a new elite corps of fighters?one with superior panache and, one would assume, better hats?would allow the government to attract a higher quality of young American to military service, one more capable of finishing the job over there. Here's how he put it:

Call them Extreme Peacekeepers or the Freedom Corps or whatever, but seek out the sort of people who aren't normally inclined to join the military?idealistic college students who hope to become doctors, lawyers, politicians or engineers and are eager to do something noble (and burnish their resumes) by serving their country.

This one passage of Klein's says just about everything you need to know about why the war effort in Iraq isn't "working." Our current pro-war crowd simply doesn't understand the emotional imperatives required of a conquering military society. You cannot lead people into the breach for the cause of "Freedom?or whatever." Language is more important than a hat. If you want to get people to run through gunfire and sulfur smoke with knives in their teeth, you need appropriate slogans: "Destroy the Seventh Snake!" "Ya Basta!" "Victory or Death!" Klein wants to use the language of a liberal arts college brochure to build a warrior society.

Which brings us to the next problem?the kind of people Klein thinks we need fighting this war. This is his biggest mistake. The last kind of person we need in Iraq is a young, idealistic intellectual. These people make lousy conquerors, as was proven repeatedly in Vietnam. In colonial wars, what you really need to get the job done are efficient professional killers, like the French Foreign Legion or the Korean mercenaries we used in Indochina. People like this, when they go into a "problem" village, they don't spend a lot of time with the Inspector Closeau search for the hidden insurgents among them. They just chop everyone's heads off and move on.

Only in rare cases does the elite product of an American university turn out to be the kind of person capable of this sort of thing. I mean, there are only so many Bob Kerreys to go around. The average college-educated American sinks into a funk in these situations, wastes the time of the military censor with long, timidly seditious letters home and then?worst of all?eventually comes home a psychological wreck, unable to contribute positively to the economic development of society, preferring instead to spend all his time expensively patronizing VA hospitals and weeping at shitty movies like Hamburger Hill.

A thousand such people are not worth one genuine, cold-blooded killer. The true warrior races on the planet understand this, which is why a few thousand Chechens could defeat the entire Russian army in the mid-90s. If we had Chechens fighting for us in Iraq, this war would have been over months ago. You'd know who the former insurgents were in Baghdad, because they'd all be walking around town without fingers. The Chechens, God bless them, do not use one knife to remove a man's fingers. They use 10 bullets. Even the Russians are freaked out by them, which is why that situation remains unresolved.

The Chechens, of course, would never fight for us, because we are on the wrong side. That is an unfortunate by-product of a policy that perhaps ought to be reviewed prior to the next round of military hostilities. When you think about it, invading Arab countries and using British, Polish and even Japanese mercenaries is a pretty high-risk, low-yield activity. A much simpler and significantly more profitable strategy would be to invade France and Germany and leave Afghani and Chechen sentries there to keep the peace. No more worries about Airbus contracts or the euro in that scenario. And with Shamil Basayev sitting in Jacques Chirac's office, it is hard to imagine domestic unrest being a serious problem.

Beyond that, we wouldn't need to pay a ransom for our new mercenary security force: The women of France would be sufficient compensation for at least the first few years.

And that, incidentally, is yet another of our problems in Iraq. If you want to recruit killers for foreign conquest, you need to be able to offer them the three basics: treasure, murder and pussy. This is why Iraq is a dead end. There is no pussy in Iraq, absolutely none. No "me so horny" scenes will be shot in the inevitable Iraq movies. There is treasure, but the soldiers don't get any; you can't steal a sack full of oil. Impotent white guys in Texas get all the treasure, which must really piss off the soldiers.

That leaves murder as the prize. And as is made clear in the Klein column, we are not making murder part of our sales pitch.

Instead, people like Klein suggest that the value of service in Iraq is a) that it looks good on the resume, and b) that it is "rewarding," the way work among the poor or in a leper ward is rewarding. This is a pretty meager payoff for risking your life every day against invisible, bloodthirsty rebels desperate for your head. But Klein makes service sound sunny, like one big EST seminar, only with bullets:

An excellent model exists in the 24-week residential training devised for the Police Corps, an elite national-service program that transforms college students into police officers. In fact, Police Corps and special-forces training are similar; both emphasize creative responses in unexpected situations, using scenarios and role playing.

Role playing? What is this, a resort for Dutch swingers? Iraqi counterinsurgency exercise no. 4: the "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" scenario. Private, put on your fucking wig!

People like Joe Klein are the reason America is a doomed society. The empires of old understood that war and killing were serious matters. They understood that the taking of human life requires grand, eternal motivations, of which there are many: conquest, self-defense, greed, glory. Killing for the sake of it also qualifies. Only Americans can imagine going to war to "burnish their resumes." What does that say about us?