His now (in)famous 2002 memo, entitled "The Perfect Storm" and co-authored with William Burns, warned that toppling Saddam Hussein risked sparking sectarian violence, involving neighbors in the conflict and requiring massive reconstruction.

Last week, Crocker looked like yet another furtive, obsequious diplomat, rather than a firebrand who does question authority. We require more of the latter, if we are to survive this perfect storm of our own making.

Of course "progress" has been made in Iraq, when the only acknowledged yardsticks involve bringing America back from imminent defeat -- 30,000 additional troops in concentrated spaces almost certainly was going to reduce levels of violence.

This progress, however, is chimerical when measured according to almost any other reasonable standard. If one's standard is ensuring Republican victory in November, then a post-surge pause lasting into the new year also might be deemed a success.

Defense Secretary Gates appeared on "Face the Nation" this week. When asked by Bob Schieffer who the enemy was in Iraq, Gates quickly answered, "the extremists." The question reveals more than the Kafkaesque answer it received.

Schieffer explicitly evoked Vietnam in his concluding remarks. Despite an enormous recuperative effort over the last three decades to "kick the Vietnam Syndrome," Americans and others are increasingly drawing parallels to this sordid time in our recent past.

Rather than recalling quagmires, winter soldiers and untoward politicians, I want to evoke the astonishing wisdom of Binghamton professor William V. Spanos, whose 2008 book is as profound as it is provocative.

Many of the brilliant arguments in his American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam are too complex for this column. One thread, though, is vitally important in light of the current controversy surrounding Iraq.

Just like Vietnam, America is producing an enemy that literally is invisible to our perception of the world. A "spectral" enemy there decomposed a vastly superior military because they refused to follow our rules for engagement or conform to our philosophical assumptions about reality.

Those Vietnamese exploited our blind spots and disappeared from our strategic view. They vanished into jungles, tunnels, and hedgerows, while effectively blurring the difference between those we purportedly were trying to "save" and those we were willing to kill.

Spanos describes these tactics as ontological, by which he means they were used to fighting Western invaders, the French, who evinced similar beliefs about what counted as being or reality. The Vietnamese defended their country by denying our reality.

In the present globalized age, explains Spanos, these spectral forces are planetary. They do not require a nation-state from which to launch their attacks against the militaries that struggle to defeat them. Now, this planetary specter can disappear almost anywhere on Earth.

When our philosophical world views were denied in Vietnam, we lashed out with genocidal violence so horrific we cannot bear to remember. Spanos foresees America's defeat by these planetary "terrorists" and possible planetary annihilation should we again lash out.

Remember "Mission Accomplished"? Rather than suffer overwhelming defeat by superior, invading U.S. forces, the "enemy" disappeared into Iraq and is continuing to stymie us with guerrilla warfare, just like in Vietnam.

The same will happen were we to achieve even further "progress" in Iraq. This enemy cannot be defeated by conventional strategies or ways of thinking. This specter will continue to haunt us across the globe and engender further genocidal violence, this time against the planet.

Petraeus did not betray us. Diplomacy did not fail us. Our refusal to rethink our most fundamental assumptions about reality just might, though. Despite protestations to the contrary, the world does not conform to our beliefs about being.

Our military cannot save us. Conventional wisdom risks "imminent global disaster." We must build a coalition of unconventional thinkers, respect the radical difference that defines our present age, and refuse the easy logic that America can do no wrong.