IT'S NOT ONLY UNJUST, IT'S COWARDLY - Just read Charles Krauthammer's latest column, and I feel dirty. I was physically sickened by it. His rant for this week is among the worst megalomaniac tirades of bestial triumph and insane hatred against anyone who opposes Israel that I have yet had the misfortune to come across during the past four months of this national madness that has seized our country. In his latest babbling bloviation, Krauthammer among other things boasts of America's "willingness to take casualties" in order to destroy Israel's enemies and stroppy Muslims in general.

Excuse me? "Willingness to take casualties"? Where has this idiot been during the past four months?

What has thus far distinguished the Ninth Crusade is America's extreme UN-willingness to take casualties, even at the cost of impaired military effectiveness. The result has been a vast increase in the completely gratuitous and unnecessary murder of thousands of Afghan villagers. In case Mr. Krauthammer missed it, all the fighting in Afghanistan was done by the Uzbek and Tadjik tribal warriors of the so-called Northern Alliance (a Soviet front group from the 1980s), and later on by Pashtun tribal mercenaries around Kandahar. The much-vaunted U. S. Marines only came slinking ashore in Afghanistan after the mountain men on horseback with Kalashnikovs and old .303 Enfields cleared the way for them.

The American military since Vietnam has been distinguished by a remarkable reluctance to get down on the ground and fight their opponents man to man. This largely has to do with the fact that the moral and physical quality of American troops is so poor that man for man, without air cover and body armor, American troops would get their asses most righteously whupped by almost any group of Third World savages you care to name if they were forced to fight on equal, one-on-one terms, and the Pentagon knows this. We can't fight genuine warriors like the Afghans with our mall rats and female soldiers, so we hide in the sky and drop bombs on them while we pay mercenaries to do what we lack the courage to do.

The Afghanistan strategy, which seems to be the template for the rest of the Crusade, is to drop bombs on villagers from the safety of 30,000 feet while hiring the local gangsters to go in on the ground and do the actual fighting, after loading them up with weapons and money and other goodies. Looks like we'll be trying this in Iraq next.

It may be cost effective, and of course the absence of body bags keeps the mush-brained American public quiescent and waving their Masonic dishrags aloft and giving that moron in the White House 90% approval ratings. But let's be clear on this: what we are doing is not only unjust, there is a stink of yellow dog cowardice about it. And don't think America's growing number of enemies haven't noticed it.