Using examples from antiquity to 1945, Hart said that guile not gore wins wars. Direct attacks against an entrenched enemy rarely work. Victory goes to the commander unhuning the enemy's equilibrium before the main battle. "The longest way round is often the shortest way . . . an indirect approach loosens the defender's hold by upsetting his balance," Hart theorised.

Iraq's US occupiers, complementing their tactics of the mailed fist (F16s, Abrams tanks, Apache gunships and other lethal toys), appear to be gingerly adopting Hart's strategy in a modest way to fight Iraqi resistance.

That is the charitable interpretation of the bizarre almost gleeful announcement of the US Iraq command on 25 October that it has captured the wife and daughter (author's emphasis) of Gen. Ebrahim Al Douri, Saddam Hossain's No. 2 man and credited by the US to be the "brains" behind Iraqi resistance.

Incredulity is the first reaction to this announcement. Good God! Is US Centcom so desperate that it trumpets the capture of one old and one young woman as a battlefield victory?

But the real purpose of detaining the mother and daughter is to use them as hostages to persuade Douri to surrender. This reprehensible and unchivalrous action contravenes international law -- the 1949 Geneva Convention 4, articles 34 and 147 -- and US Military Law.

Art. 34 states unequivocally that the taking of hostages is prohibited. Art. 147 characterises hostage taking as one of a number of "grave breaches" of the laws of war.

Art. 97 of the Uniform US Military Code of Justice threatens court martial to any soldier who unlawfully detains any person. Hah! Hell will freeze over before courts martial are convened due to the detention of these women.

This is not the first time that history's "best ever military machine" (Bush) has used women as hostages. On last 30 July, GIs picked up the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general. They left a note: If you want your family released, turn yourself in.

Brigade commander Col. David Hogg justified this outrageous tactic with this hogwash: "It's an intelligence operation with detainees, and these people have info." (And we have the ammo, the intrepid colonel could have added).

If senior US officers brazenly break their own laws and international ones with impudent impunity and defend it with laughable justification, no wonder ordinary GIs are insanely trigger-happy, shooting first without bothering to ask questions then or later. After all, Iraqis are merely ragheads or "hajjis" to GIs and fair game for summary firepower.

But lest Iraqi resistance get any funny ideas that Centcom is abandoning its hard line tactics (such as collective punishment, turning Saddam's village into a concentration camp, and secret assassinations echoing Vietnam's Phoenix programmes) in favour of Hart's indirect approach, the Pentagon announced on 24 October that it is sending 3,000 Marines to "restore security" in Iraq.

Now Marines are one of the Pentagon's elite killing machines, specialists in amphibious sea-borne landings.So why are they going to riverine Iraq?

Basically, to perform urban counter-insurgency operations in the Sunni triangle and Baghdad. Towards this goal, the Marines -- some of whom saw action in Iraq in March/April under the First Marine Expeditionary Force -- reportedly have undergone specialised training for the past months.

Their purported model: the operations of France's 10th Para Division under Gen. Jacques Massu in the Algiers Kasbah in 1957. To smash Algerian resistance, torture (electric shock, near-drowning, beatings etc) was common; summary executions (over 3,000 disappeared) also (see Henri Alleg: The Question. Sartre's preface to this book shocked France from its ostrich-like complacency on Algeria and materially hastened French departure from there).

Gillo Pontecorvo's (brother of the famed physicist Bruno) black and white film The Battle of Algiers made in 1965 chillingly portrays what the paras did and how. Its main character Col. Philippe Mathieu is modelled on Massu.

While the French now refuse to send sodiers to Iraq, it is believed they (and the Israeli Defence Forces) have cooperated with the Pentagon in providing orientation to the Marines through intelligence, archival access and maybe interviews with Algiers survivors. Is Paris repaying Washington for the help it got in the First Indo-China War (1948-54) before Dien Bien Phu ended Gallic colonial ambitions?

France's cooperation is unsurprising. French opposition to US over Iraq arises not from any sympathy for Iraqis -- after all, Iraq was the progeny of the infamous Sykes-Picot treaty of 1916 -- or doctrinal considerations (multilateralism et al). It's a cold-blooded appraisal of France's long-term strategic and commercial interests in the Arab world.

As of now, both France and US share a tacit common interest in a pacified Iraq. One benefit would be that it would allow Elf and Exxon among other western oil companies to access Iraq's oil.

The Marines deployment to Iraq should be a tonic to the hard-pressed GIs there. They are under attack by "hajjis," under-paid (their combat pay has been cut) and under-appreciated world-wide, and increasingly in the US, despite their role as missionaries ministering democracy to Iraqis.

To show his solidarity with the GIs, Bush made a lightning three-hour visit to the bunkers of Baghdad International Airport on November 27 to share Thanksgiving dinner with US troops. A photo-op that will play well to US domestic audience, compensate somewhat for Bush's indiscreet Mission Accomplished speech of May 1, and in effect is the first shot of his re-election battle.

It also suggests that GI morale in Iraq is so stressed-out that the C-in-C has to make a trip to give it a shot in the arm.Bush's visit will have negligible impact upon Iraqis or the course of the guerrilla war.

But it shows that while jobs will be the pivotal issue in the presidential elections, the Rivers of Babylon could overflow into US politics next year.

Oderint dum metuant -- let them hate as long as they fear -- was Rome's national security mantra against the barbarian threats astride the empire's marches. Bush's policy of full spectrum dominance through unilateral conflict in third world lands (mainly Muslim) distant from Pax Americana's shores pretty much follows this Ceasarian strategy.

The difference is that, in this digital age, imperialism foments hate geometrically to every arithmetical increase using instruments of fear. This could upset the best laid plans of mice and men.

The outcome of the US occupation of Iraq is uncertain. What is certain is that it has created much uncertainty in the international security system, misery for Iraqis and opportunity for Democrats to bash Bush.

And what of Massu and his minions? In an interview in 1990, the then 92-year-old general appeared penitent. France, he said, should recognise and condemn the actions taken at the time. "Morally," he said, "torture is ugly."

General Paul Aussaresses, who was 39 and in charge of French military intelligence in 1957, admitted on French radio that he "personally killed 24 Algerian prisoners." Does this make him a Klaus Barbie lite? Aussaresses showed minimum remorse for what he did. "If I had to do it all over again, I'd be upset. But I don't think there were any alternatives."

The French authorities are in a pickle over how to tackle the confessions of these now geriatric former killers in uniform.

One wonders what present-day US commanders and policy makers handling Iraq will say two decades hence. Like Massu and Aussaresses, will they invoke the Nuremberg defence and claim they were patriots following orders and there were no alternatives?

Or shall we see repentance, Robert McNamara style? His autobiography "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam" concluded that the US was "terribly wrong" on Vietnam.

A troubled conscience led McNamara to leave the Pentagon, become World Bank president, and atone for his sins by launching a messianic war against poverty as ferocious as his bloody war in Vietnam.

It's difficult to envisage the rambunctious Rumsfeld doing a McNamara. Anyway, we'll have to wait and see what Rummy writes. The Iraq drama has many acts to go before the curtain falls.

Mumtaz Iqbal is a retired banker.