While teaching a recent adult education course on the ancient histories of the so-called "axis of evil" countries of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, I showed the class a copy of my grandfather’s citation for gallantry during a river crossing approaching Basra, in southern Iraq. He advanced with the British and Indian troops to capture Baghdad. This "Mention in Dispatches" was sent to the king to commend this British noncommissioned officer for his bravery in the field and was signed in 1917 by Secretary of State for War Winston Churchill. The British are still there, having returned in 1991 and 2003.

On wresting Mesopotamia - now mainly Iraq - from the Turks, Gen. Sir Stanley Maude posted proclamations in Baghdad announcing the British had come not as occupiers but as liberators to free the Iraqis from their oppressors. They would establish a provisional governing council, introduce democracy, create an Iraqi army, produce a constitution, establish a Parliament and bring in a head of state. Arabs would be repaid with independence for their help in the fight against the Turks.

Not widely emphasized was the Royal Navy’s growing need for oil as its ships switched from burning coal and the paramount need to safeguard British interests in India. Part of the postwar settlement was the artificial line drawn on a map, splitting off part of Mesopotamia’s Basra province to create the new state of Kuwait.

The citizens of the new country called Iraq did not appreciate the exchange of one occupier for another, nor did they consider themselves liberated. And when in 1920 Iraqis learned that the League of Nations had granted Iraq mandate status under Britain, rather than the independence they had been led to expect, the country exploded into the same kind of brutal guerrilla war facing the United States today. For the first time in history, Sunni and Shiite fighters jointly battled the British and Indian troops. The situation eventually was brought under control after savage fighting that cost both the imperial forces and the Iraqis dearly. In addition to large numbers of British and Indian troops, the British had to resort to the Royal Air Force and weapons of mass destruction - mustard gas - to keep a modicum of control until they withdrew.

The war was widely deplored at home in Britain. Many British soldiers also resented having to fight in Iraq after enduring World War I. One observer with unparalleled knowledge of guerrilla warfare in the region wrote from Baghdad that by intervening militarily, Britain had been led into a trap "from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour." He went on to write to his readers at home that, "They had been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information ... the Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows." He ended by saying, "We are not far from a disaster."

The British had to scale back their planned time in Iraq, and the Iraqis today look back with pride on what they call "The Great Iraqi Revolution of 1920," a seminal event in their history. The writer, T. E. Lawrence, known to history as Lawrence of Arabia, knew what he was talking about, as he had written the book on guerrilla warfare in the region.

Few since Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan have had any luck in fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan. Historians will have to look for reasons why the United States chose to stain itself in history by starting a war of choice with a state that, despite its brutal dictator, had not harmed the hair of a single American. The shifting reasons for starting the war should be well known by now, but one of its proponents, Paul Wolfowitz, was said to have written that "weapons of mass destruction" was chosen for bureaucratic reasons.

The war was launched in March 2003, and Baghdad fell in three weeks, the bridges leading to it and other key installations remaining conveniently intact. The Asia Times and others reported the United States had bribed key Iraqi military and political leaders to desert their troops and leave them leaderless - this was the "safqua" - the secret deal.

Many of us who had spent considerable time in Vietnam soon saw the pattern of the war to come. While the differences are obvious - desert versus mountain, urban versus jungle - the principles were similar. The recent assault on Fallujah is instructive. If the generals are to be believed, it is worrying because it indicates they have no clear understanding about guerrilla warfare.

After a few days during which elements of two heavily armed U.S. divisions, backed by armor, artillery, helicopters and fighters, blasted their way into the city and were said to have killed more than 1,000 "insurgents," a top Marine general said they had "broken the back" of the insurgency. One hopes he really knew better, because it is basic guerrilla doctrine never to stand and fight regular troops. The backbone and the brains actually escaped, leaving a determined rearguard to exact a price from the attackers, who by destroying so much of the city might well have created another Guernica, a town in northern Spain where the massacre of civilians during the Spanish Civil War caused outraged reaction. In Fallujah, innocent Iraqi males rounded up and later released to find their homes razed simply swelled the ranks of the Iraqi resistance. Barring relief to civilians in the city by the Red Crescent increased the hatred of Americans around the world.

The United States seems to have learned nothing from the Vietnam disaster, in which the North Vietnamese gained all their political and military objectives and the United States was defeated in all of its goals. By the definition of the West’s military guru, Carl von Clausewitz, this was a loss. Some familiar patterns are starting to emerge:

● The guerrillas are indistinguishable from the populace at large.

● U.S. forces are confined to ground lines of communication, leaving them open to ambush after ambush. This is an insoluble problem given the reliance on wheeled and tracked vehicles.

● As in Vietnam, there are not enough troops, given the rough rule of thumb that 10 soldiers are needed for every guerrilla.

● Baghdad, like Saigon, cannot be secured.

● We are back to the future in giving body counts, which in Vietnam so damaged the integrity of the officer corps by inducing lying on a large scale and the counting of civilian dead as enemy casualties.

● U.S. troops are again confined to large fortified bases between operations, leaving most of the countryside and towns to the resistance.

● Large sweeps - search-and-destroy operations so unsuccessful in Vietnam - are back in fashion, with apparently similar results.

● Troop rotation is again a problem, for soldiers rotate home when they have finally honed their combat skills.

● Like the South Vietnamese army, which had many brave soldiers, the Iraqi security forces cannot stand up to the resistance given the vulnerability of their families to retribution.

● Reports of torture and the killing of prisoners by U.S. troops have been publicized worldwide. At this writing, the International Committee of the Red Cross has accused the United States of torturing prisoners at its Guantanamo Bay prison.

● Like some Vietnam veterans in an earlier age, some Iraq veterans have formed a similar organization, Iraq Veterans Against the War, to oppose the U.S. intervention there.

● As in Vietnam, terror works.

One thing we wish U.S. officials had not done was to ensconce themselves in the palaces vacated by Saddam Hussein and other top regime officials - the symbolism was dreadful but apparently lost on the obtuse administrators sent to govern Iraq.

One unforeseen - by Washington, at least - result of the war on Iraq is the exposure of the relative weakness of America’s ground forces. Specialists in this field have long known this. Many strategic thinkers have noted that since Vietnam, care had been taken to limit American wars to small states such as Panama, Grenada and the like. But relatively small wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have stretched and exhausted U.S. ground forces and caused heavy reliance on the reserve troops, most of whom were ill prepared for war. Thus, Iran could say it did not worry much about being invaded by the United States because few American troops were left for the job. The United States does not even want to consider a fight with the tough million-man North Korean army. Any serious fight with Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia or other large country would be problematic because U.S. conventional forces are not strong enough to prevail.

What is the outlook for the war in Iraq? For the answer, we must look back to Vietnam, where there was no good way out. The United States, exhausted like France before it by the grignotage - the slow bleeding of its forces by the enemy - simply stopped fighting. In the words of former NATO Land Forces commander Gen. Sir Walter Walker, the Paris Peace Accord was for the United States a "fig leaf to cover a scuttle." How will we end the war in Iraq, where the United States is again stuck fast? It cannot win, and to save face it cannot get out.

Are we slow learners, victims of insufferable hubris or both? It is true: Plus ca change, plus ca la meme chose - the more things change, the more they stay the same.