In his critically acclaimed 2002 book “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” Hedges treated war as the ultimate narcotic, an addiction he himself had barely managed to kick. Now, in “What Every Person Should Know About War,” he offers up a handbook of simple questions and answers about war that range from the mundane, even silly (“Will I make friends during combat?”) to the morbid (“What will my body look like after I die?”) to the transcendent (“What does it feel like to die?”). “We ennoble war,” he writes by way of explaining the book. “We turn it into entertainment. And in all this we tend to forget what war is about…”

Hedges is an author who seems to practice what he preaches. In late May, in an apparent attempt to emulate one of the heroes of his earlier book–the World War I antiwar activist Edmund Dean Morel–Hedges was booed off the stage during a commencement speech at Rockford College in Illinois. Disdaining popular support for what was still then seen as a brilliantly successful war, Hedges warned that Iraq would turn into a “cesspool” for America just as it once had for the British in 1917. Iraq was a war of liberation, he declared, but “it is now a war of liberation by Iraqis from American occupation…. We are embarking on an occupation that, if history is any guide, will be as damaging to our souls as it will be to our prestige, power, and security.”

Two months later, Hedges’s warnings look prescient. Rather than an inspiring opening shot in the neocon campaign to transform the Arab world, Iraq has turned into a godawful mess that the Bush administration seems barely able to reckon with, one it did astonishingly little planning for. And doubts about the administration’s reasons for going to war grow each week that Saddam’s much-warned-of weapons of mass destruction aren’t found. In other respects, too, Hedges’ seemingly quixotic efforts to rub Americans’ faces in the true horrors of war–and to challenge his fellow correspondents to report them–seem more pertinent than ever. Hence, we at home hear little or nothing about the thousands of Iraqis–soldiers and civilians–we killed during the most recent war, and there seems to be little interest in the U.S. media about tallying their numbers (apparently, for the Pentagon, another benefit of embedding, and therefore co-opting, journalists). Hence, the much restated tale of Jessica Lynch’s rescue seems to veer between the unsexy reality of the hapless victim of a botched support mission and the official myth, insistently put forward by Pentagon sources, of a brave and doughty private.

Yet for all that Hedges adds to the debate, something about both his books feels off message today. Perhaps it is Hedges’s relentless self-righteousness, which is inscribed in fiery prose on every page of “War Is a Force…” As a man who, by his own admission, is still fighting his own nightmares–“I struggle with the demons all who have been to war must bear,” he intones in his latest book– Hedges sometimes displays the excessive zeal of the converted. So repelled is he by war of all kinds–and his own schizoid attraction to it–that he tends to lump all wars together as bad. More tellingly, he seems to see all nations as equally deluded by the “moral certitude” of their cause. This is both historically inaccurate and morally offensive. It defies common sense and decency to equate Hitler’s war of aggression with FDR’s designs to bring America into World War II, or Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait with George H.W. Bush’s reluctant decision to drive him out. More recently, going to war with Iraq may have been wrong–I happen to believe it was a major strategic error, mainly because we declared Saddam an “imminent” threat when he clearly wasn’t and we should have been focused on destroying al Qaeda. But that doesn’t mean there were no legitimate, even humanitarian reasons for removing Saddam at all. Yet in Hedges’s moral universe there apparently is little room for such a debate.

Perhaps because of his zeal to posit war as an absolute evil, Hedges’s new “manual” on war also sidesteps the profound new reality of the world we’re in. Hedges, in his Rockford speech, declared that after “our defeat in Vietnam, we became a better nation. We were humbled….Today that humility is gone.” But was a Vietnam-haunted America really a better nation? Tell that to the men who, fearful of casualties, failed to avert the genocide in Rwanda, and who orchestrated the uncertain, self-doubting interventions in Somalia, the Balkans, Haiti and Kosovo in the ’90s. The truth is far more complicated. There is an excellent reason why war today has become a temptation once again: America has become very, very good at it. Say what you will about George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, they seem to have succeeded (using, to a large extent, Bill Clinton’s military) at finally exorcising those ghosts of Vietnam. No, today’s problem is a very different one, and Hedges doesn’t really address it. In the era of precision-guided combat and America’s near omnipotence in military power, we are learning that the true quagmires of the 21st century are likely to be what happens after the horror of war. As the number of Americans killed in “postwar” Iraq approaches the number actually killed in combat, we are learning that the issue is less complacency about war than complacency about the aftermath. And if we truly reckon with that–as the Bush administration is still failing to do in Afghanistan and Iraq today–it should give us humility enough to spare.