I'm already smarter than the president
a t-shirt mass-produced for the toddler set

There's a moment in the movie The Fog of War where Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, seems to recognize the fundamental failure of everyone (including himself) who pushed the Vietnam War.

Back in the 1990s, he went back to Vietnam and met some of his war-era counterparts. One man who had served as foreign minister, I believe, asked McNamara how it was that we (the United States) could have ever believed that the communist North Vietnamese were somehow puppets of China or the Soviet Union or anyone. "We spent a thousand years fighting the Chinese," McNamara quotes the man as saying. "Look in any history book."

McNamara was famous as a numbers man. In World War II, he helped to make bombing runs more efficient. He took that same ability to Ford and championed such cars as the Falcon--a massively successful model. With Vietnam, he tried to make military operations more and more efficient, but no matter how many North Vietnamese we killed, we still weren't winning the war. He kept running his numbers, but apparently he didn't read his history. It's difficult to defeat an entrenched nationalist uprising no matter how superior your force.

Maureen Dowd's column today notes the striking parallels between modern-day Iraq and ancient Troy. And she tosses in a few astute observations from Barbara W. Tuchman's book The March of Folly. I myself liked the bits about "wooden-headed leadership."

I know the Prez doesn't read books. And I know he doesn't read newspapers, either. But I think he watches movies. I've got one for him: Red Dawn.

It's a dreadful movie: horribly scripted, badly acted and artlessly directed. But I think the Prez would like the story. What happens is that the Russians invade the U.S. and conquer large parts of it. A small band of teenagers (led by a studly Patrick Swayze) launch a guerrilla war against the occupiers. It's a flag-waving noir (most of the kids get killed), but within all the nonsense there is a central truth: People everywhere will fight to the death to oust an occupying army.

There's another central truth that seems to have been skipped by the Prez and his pals: Democracy cannot be formed out of whole cloth. How many nations can you name that quickly and (mostly) peacefully transitioned from a long history of totalitarian rule to stable democracy?

The only possible answers are some of the former communist bloc nations (Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, etc.) and Costa Rica. I think it's fair to say that the eastern European nations had plenty of exposure to democracy prior to the fall of communism. And unfortunately, Costa Rica has experienced a few "banana republic" moments in recent months.

Don't go spouting that "We did it, didn't we?" nonsense. Of course we didn't. There's this thing called the Magna Carta. Written in 1215, it was the first time that a monarch (in this case, King John of England) had conceded certain powers--in writing--to his vassals (or barons, in this case). Many of the ideals of our Constitution come from later expansions of the Magna Carta. England in the 1700s was a constitutional monarchy. There's a reason why "No taxation without representation" was a catchphrase of the early days of the American Revolution. That's because the English colonists were accustomed to the idea of representative democracy from their days in the mother country, and they were mad that they didn't have it in the colonies.

While the goals of the Iraq war (remove Saddam Hussein, create a stable democracy and skip out of town without a lengthy occupation) were noble, they weren't realistic. That sort of democratic "reboot" has never happened in the history of the world. Never. Not once. There are two methods of conquest that have been proven over the ages. The first is to simply annihilate the opponent and occupy the land. This is pretty effective, but not really acceptable these days. The second--perfected by Alexander the Great--is to wander through, defeat the local militia and create a conduit for your culture to flourish. The key is to do as little damage as possible and to allow local leaders a say in their governing. The Romans--heirs to much of Alexander's empire--managed to rule this way for a few hundred years. But you still have to occupy the country in question. In other words, you simply off the old tyrant so that you can take his (and, for the most part, we are talking about men) place. Which makes the second method unpalatable as well.

Some folks point to the Marshall Plan after World War II and the work we did in Germany and Japan. We don't occupy those countries any more, right? Well, we still have military bases in both nations, though we do not exercise any political control. In addition, the Marshall Plan was terribly expensive and took years of true occupation to implement. Also, both Germany and Japan had experience with democratic elections, so we didn't have to change that part of the culture. Yeah, we "demoted" the Japanese emperor, but by WWII the emperor was not in control of the country, anyway.

History cannot predict the future, but it does have a few lessons for us. It can tell us when our expectations are unrealistic. It helps us to learn from our mistakes. Even if, as McNamara observed in The Fog of War, it takes three, four or five times to learn the lesson.

History's lesson for Iraq appears to be simple, if abhorrent: We must occupy and rebuild Iraq, no matter how long it takes or how expensive a venture that might be. Anything less would not just be stupid, it would be immoral. We've spent the last 13 years destroying Iraq. It's our responsibility to make it whole.

Maybe history will call it "The Kerry Plan."

Jon Worley hasn't bought one of those "I'm smarter than the Prez" t-shirts for his son Max, but he's thinking about it.