AND SPEAKING OF civilizational collapse, we have Jared Diamond, the UCLA geography professor whose 1997 book, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, won the Pulitzer Prize and whose new volume bears the Irwin Allen-style disaster movie title Collapse and the sobering subtitle How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Diamond is one of those rare intellectual figures in whom the great sweeps of science and social sense are reconciled; he is also master of the telling tidbit, the little key that opens some great vault of revelation.

Our word Vikings, for instance, is derived from the word víkingar, which means, in Old Norse – the language of the Vikings – "raiders." No surprise there. Most of us have some sense of the Vikings and their gory doings; their swords-and-beards myth persists to this day not only in the slapstick NFL team but in those Capital One credit card ads on television in which the Vikings represent high interest rates and a menace to the joy of credit limit-surfing consumers nationwide. What is less widely known is that the Vikings first sallied forth from early medieval Scandinavia as traders, bringing to eager markets elsewhere in Europe and the British Isles such luxury items as seal skins and beeswax.

But, as Diamond rather drolly notes, "once some Scandinavian traders had discovered sea routes to rich peoples who could pay for furs with silver and gold, ambitious younger brothers of those traders realized that they could acquire that same silver and gold without paying for it." Thus began several centuries of lucrative pillage and slaughter from Near Asia to the New World; only as the Vikings' "European targets gradually came to expect them and to defend themselves" from Viking attacks did those aggressions begin to wane. At length the great military adventure ended and the circle closed, leaving Norway "known not for its feared raiders but for its exports of dried codfish."

Diamond's theme in Collapse is of course the undoing of civilizations through ecological depredation, and clearly he has our own clear-cutting, strip-mining civilization in mind throughout his fascinating volume. Military folly is at best a tangential theme of Collapse, although war as practiced by modern raiders – like us – does have enormous environmental implications. The Vikings, for all their ferocity, did not use Agent Orange or artillery shells filled with depleted uranium.

But it may be that in the story of the Vikings we can also read the story of ourselves: pillagers of the world's booty by virtue of a presumed military superiority that turned out not to be superior; an aggressor society that laid itself low through overreaching even before its environmental madnesses caught up with it. Few rational observers would at this point disagree, I suspect, that President George W. Bush has failed in Iraq: the war is lost. It is just a matter of deciding when and under what false pretenses we will exit (as we entered), and how many of ours and theirs must die or be maimed in the meantime. But what is also quite apparent, if we are willing to look at the facts and the truth, is that our much-vaunted military cannot do what our deranged politicians ask of it.

It is true that we are able to bomb and invade impoverished, defenseless, faraway countries and not be pushed out by force. We can maintain troops in Afghanistan and Iraq – and in the dozens of other countries around the world that, for one reason or another, accept our alien presence – so long as the domestic will and budget suffice. But invading a country is not the same as subduing it, and Iraq, far from being an aberration, is merely the latest place we have, at great loss of life and limb and immeasurable ecological damage, failed to subdue. Earlier examples include Korea and Vietnam. Our military record since the end of World War II, in fact, is overwhelmingly one of failure, punctuated only by a pair of successful pipsqueak interventions in Grenada and Panama and a more interesting operation in Kuwait in 1991 whose success (which should have been a model of modern military strategy) owed much to its genuine international character and limited, clearly defined goals.

While I have yet to see any frank analysis of this sort in the New York Times or any other of those peddlers of conventional wisdom and patriotic blather we know and love as the mainstream press, I am certain the rest of world has noted what we have been so spectacularly unable to do. If George W. Bush were not a fool for the ages, he would have menaced Saddam Hussein with our expeditionary force, our planes and ships and cruise missiles, the huge arsenal just across the Kuwaiti border. He would have used the military threat as a diplomatic tool, understanding that the military is most effective when positioned but not used. He would have gotten most of what he wanted without pulling the trigger or losing a life, and the world would never have known for sure what we could and couldn't do in battle. Other villains would have had to assume the worst.

But, being a coward enveloped in privilege, transfixed by visions of ball-scratching machismo, and whispered to by a host of knaves, he pulled the trigger, people died and continue to die, and now the world does know. We are paper tigers. How one says that in Old Norse I do not know.