Even by Tom Daschle's exacting standards, Bush's ability to coax surrender and defection out of the enemy military must go down in history as one of the proudest moments in American diplomacy. He has turned Clausewitz's famous dictum - that war is diplomacy by other means - on its head: Diplomacy has become war by other means, deploying talk as a precision-guided munition.

What, after all, is "psy-ops" but military diplomacy? Convincing the other side that there is no chance of victory, that surrender is the best option, was apparently a lot easier than persuading France of the exact opposite - that there was a good chance of winning and that giving up was the wrong way to go. (The French love surrender so!)

As this is written (and anything can change in war) the only organized resistance to the United States armed forces is to be found in peace marches.

In a broader sense (and from the perspective of a life spent in politics), the military's use of psy-ops to dissuade Iraqi generals from fighting is the third step in a remarkable accommodation by our fighting men and women to political realities.

In the past, changing military strategy was driven by technology - the introduction of the machine gun, the tank, the airplane. But now it is adapting rapidly to political considerations.

In a democracy, the American military has learned that it must not just destroy enemy soldiers (or talk them into surrender) but has to maintain cohesive domestic support for our objectives. Mindful that we lost the war in Vietnam not through any defeat on the battlefield, but by losing the national consensus that impelled our involvement in the first place, the military has taken a series of steps to build and keep public support for its efforts.

More than any other factor, it was the massive American death toll - 58,000 U.S. troops - that drove opposition to the Vietnam War. Then, when even the politicians realized we must disentangle ourselves from the jungle war, the hundreds of prisoners of war our bombing campaign had left in North Vietnamese prisons made withdrawal hard to achieve.

So our politically conscious military came to a conclusion after Vietnam: Don't incur large American casualties and don't let our soldiers become POWs. Stand-off bombing, remotely piloted drone aircraft, cruise missiles and a host of other military innovations made it possible to wage war that cost more in dollars but less in American lives - and which minimized the chances of our men and women being captured.

From the first Gulf War came the next political imperative: Don't cause large civilian casualties. As our political standards became more ecumenical and the lives of enemy civilians a focus of global concern, the far-sighted leaders of the Pentagon developed better precision-guided munitions, designed to kill the unformed opposition with pinpoint accuracy, avoiding the death of innocents.

As part of this effort, our military also developed "smart" land mines which can be turned off once the war ends, no longer threatening the lives of those, often children, who step on them.

Now, it appears, the defense establishment has made yet another adaptation to the political environment - learning to wage war without many deaths on either side, military or civilian.

* By refining psy-ops and bringing to it the intimacy of contact and diplomacy through e-mail and cell phones, the military has figured out how to induce surrender by a combination of threats, persuasion and temptation.

* By giving reporters easy access to the front lines of the battle, the military assures that news of allied success will quickly reach the enemy's generals.

* By using intelligence to generate decapitation strikes, we guarantee that they will know that war means they are about to meet the 70 virgins waiting for them in the great beyond.

So in Iraq, we give a war and nobody came.