Send Julia Roberts, not tanks

There is growing dissension and dismay in the US armed forces about their prospects of victory in Iraq. The signs expressing solidarity with the nation's soldiers are still conspicuous around army bases across America. But commanders and soldiers alike are conducting an increasingly anguished debate. The specter of Vietnam looms large in the minds of many US soldiers. In recent years the US army has been forged into a motivated, effective tool for large-scale military operations overseas. But it has never been suited to combating insurgency. Guerrillas and suicide bombers can impose a deadly corrosion on conventional forces.

Years ago, I heard an American general's lament for what was once a formidable cold war fighting machine. He said to me: "We went into Korea in 1950 with a very poor army, and came out of it in 1953 with a very good one. We went into Vietnam in 1964 with a fine army, and came out in 1975 with a terrible one." This is the threat that some thoughtful American officers see hanging over the Iraq deployment. The US armed forces are fighting the sort of conflict that least suits their capabilities. It would be a devastating blow to the confidence painstakingly rebuilt since Vietnam if the US, having committed enormous resources and suffered painful casualties, was obliged to quit Iraq without achieving its purposes.

Yet would military failure represent decisive defeat? Might not America ultimately prevail in Iraq by means in which armed forces play no part? Consider this proposition from Edward Luttwak, the maverick American strategy guru. In a recent speech to a British audience, he suggested that the US began to win the Vietnam War the day after its envoy was humiliatingly evacuated from the roof of the Saigon embassy in April 1975. The military conflict was lost but, Luttwak argued, the US began to achieve victory culturally and economically. Vietnam may still be a communist state in theory, but in reality capitalism is taking hold at every level. American values, represented by corporatism and schools of management studies, are gaining sway over Vietnam as surely as they are over every other nation possessed of education and aspirations to prosperity.

Luttwak describes what is happening as the US acquiring a "virtual empire", founded upon cultural dominance - a convincing proposition, certainly in the eyes of Osama bin Laden, who is attempting to mobilise the Muslim world to resist it. Al-Qaida is seeking to combat through terrorism a cultural invasion more effective than stealth bombers and Bradley fighting vehicles. Bill Gates and Steven Spielberg represent influences much harder to repel than a field army.

Luttwak's remarks raise the fascinating possibility that, while the US might be obliged to abandon its military struggle in Iraq, its values will still triumph. Might Baghdad emulate Saigon in surrendering its soul to the US, in a fashion Bin Laden would find repugnant, long after the last American soldier has gone home? I am not arguing that military power is redundant. But recent history suggests that America is less skilful in exploiting armed might to fulfil its national purposes than in using economic and cultural power, without a soldier in sight.

Last spring in a refugee camp in Gaza, I was quizzing a cluster of children about what they enjoyed watching on television.

Without hesitation they cried: "Rambo! Rambo!" It is hard to think of a less appropriate role model. What seemed significant, however, was not the identity of their icon, but its source. These children's parents had come to fear, mistrust and, often, hate America. Yet Hollywood possesses a power greater than any that President Bush can exercise through the Pentagon. Whatever the political hostility of young Palestinians to the US, they cannot escape its cultural ubiquity.

To return to Iraq: even if the insurgents are successful in forcing the US to abandon its armed struggle, they have much less chance of prevailing against Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and their kind, who can sustain an occupation of Iraqi homes effortlessly now that satellite TV is almost universally available.

How fascinating it will be if great armies prove less relevant to the movement of societies in the 21st century than cultural forces. We saw a foretaste of this in the last part of the 20th century. It was not Ronald Reagan's rearmament of America that brought the Soviet "evil empire" to its knees, but economic failure, and it was the same force that obliged the South African apartheid regime to surrender.

In the poorest and least educated societies on earth it is likely that power will continue to be contested at gunpoint. But wherever people are susceptible to external cultural influences ~ and, in fairness to George Bush, "wherever they are given freedom to receive such influences" ~ soldiers are likely to find their relevance diminished.

I do not think the US armed forces will achieve their military purposes in Iraq. The soldiers who have become pessimistic about the campaign they are waging are probably right. But in a long historic view, Microsoft and DreamWorks could achieve a dominance of Baghdad and a power over Iraqi society that eludes George Bush and his armored legions.