Clausewitz is probably quoted a lot more often than he's read. This isn't too surprising, since his book is 700 pages long, and it's actually (sadly for history) an unfinished manuscript that's pretty rough going in places. And whatever language you're speaking, Clausewitz is misquoted, maybe, as often as he's quoted.

What Clausewitz actually said about war and politics was that war is a tool of politics, and war should only be fought with a clear political goal in mind -- such as, for instance, the liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein and his crazy sons' murderous tyranny. Dear ole Carl wanted to strongly caution folks against thinking of war as something in the abstract, that existed in and of itself somehow as a disembodied (pardon the awful pun) battle between warriors. His message was that those warriors served politicians, and the bloody fighting all took place in the practical world, with real goals and real agendas beyond just victory over the enemy's army in the field.

Speaking of agendas, it seems with all the strange goings on in the world right now that we ought to add an appendix or even a codicil to the legacy of Clausewitz:

Anti-war is politics carried out by other means. Peace doesn't happen in an abstract vacuum any more than war does.

What the heck, you may well ask, am I trying to get at here?

Well, first off, observe the bizarre contradiction between genuine images of Iraqis embracing American and Allied troops in southern Iraq as liberators, at the same time different people far from Iraq demonstrate vehemently against that same Operation Iraqi Freedom and try to label it a war crime.

Second, observe the almost obscenely gleeful greed with which some of America's most strident political opponents in the U.N. these days re Iraq -- France, and Germany, and South Korea too -- are licking their chops over massive windfall profits to be reaped by their construction firms moving into Iraq to rebuild that country once the fighting is done.

There are vital lessons for all of us in both these observations.

Lesson #1 of Clausewitz Redux: Peace demonstrators, for all their sincerity, need to be reminded that peace is something you have to earn and then protect. The worst possible time to turn Peacenik, and turn against the White House and the Pentagon and the troops, is at that very last minute when diplomacy and deterrence have clearly failed -- and the only alternative to suffering eventual attack by weapons of mass destruction is to prosecute a preventive war immediately. Peace is wonderful, of course, but it doesn't happen through wishful thinking, or by spontaneous generation out of thin air. Real world history is ugly, and riven with armed strife. Pacifists have all too often become the enablers of very bad wars.

Lesson #2 of Clausewitz Redux: Other nations' political heads, whom we might label with some justice the Coalition of the Unwilling, are all too happy to blame our Commander in Chief (and his advisors) for not listening to them months ago. But there's a big difference between not listening, and listening without being swayed by false-hearted misguidance backed by calculated manipulativeness. (I'll defend that intentionally provocative statement below.) Warfighting is about knowing your goals very clearly, and never wavering. So bully for you, George W! Carl von Clausewitz would be proud.

The "United Nations," a phrase often used by FDR during World War II to refer only to the Allies, ought to change its name back to the League of Nations, symbolically. "League" captures more of the flavor today, as in a professional sports league. In other words, an arena for stark confrontation, for competing in zero-sum games where by definition if one side wins the other side suffers a loss. A place where teams sometimes brawl on the field, or there are even deadly riots in the stands. If there's relationship-mending to be done once the good war in Iraq is finally over, let the "offensive players" in Europe be the ones who come to us.

The forthrightness of these foreign leaders who opposed the very idea of the war is debunked as their selfish agenda unfolds point by point with embarrassing clarity. Allow me to paraphrase, not what they say but what they appear to do:

"Let America be the one who, yet again, spends a fortune in treasure and blood to keep the world safe for democracy."

"Let us, the Coalition of the Unwilling, loudly oppose a war we know the U.S. has every intention out of sheer necessity to fight. Let us play both ends against the middle, and retain whatever goodwill we think we hold in the Middle East. Don't forget protecting our business dealings with Saddam Hussein -- ones we don't want anyone else to be thinking about right now."

"Never mind that we, the Unwilling, are all linked dangerously close to Baghdad by a porous land bridge, Eurasia. Never mind that we, in fact, are far more vulnerable to having a terrorist atom bomb -- or smallpox or whatever -- smuggled by truck from Iraq to our capital cities."

"Let the U.S. do the fighting and the dying and the killing for us by proxy, and take the heat and suffer the blame, while we sit back and cherish a phony moral righteousness. . . . And maybe, 'cause of that dangerous land bridge and those self-same leaky borders, we oughta keep our heads well down, and keep making nice to Saddam."

"And then, goody goody, let's move in fast to the post-war version of Iraq that America and Great Britain and their handful of allies fought for, and make a quick and easy fortune for ourselves by building things and selling stuff."

If I sound a bit sarcastic, I'll plead mea culpa. If I sound implausible, though, I think you better think again. What we have is an almost textbook-perfect case of anti-war as politics carried out by other, nefarious means. If the politicians go on exploiting the common-folk Pacifist Movement, then the embodiment of Clausewitz Redux is complete.

Carl von Clausewitz's last will and testament went through probate lifetimes ago. But it isn't too late to gain life-saving guidance from his modern codicil: America, stick to your guns.

JoeBuff.Com / Joe Buff Inc. Joe Buff, President Dutchess County, New York E-Mail readermail@JoeBuff.Com