EARLY LAST SEPTEMBER, just before the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the Atlantic Monthly’s October 2001 issue hit the newsstand. Rarely has a major magazine’s cover story been swept so quickly into irrelevance. William Langewiesche’s article "Peace Is Hell" — touted on the cover as A FIELD REPORT ON THE PAX AMERICANA — chewed over the ironies of the US Army’s boring peacekeeping mission in Bosnia. Langewiesche laid out the case, championed by the Bush administration in the 2000 campaign and in its first few months in office, that even such small deployments of troops to places such as the Balkans overtaxed America’s military strength and readiness.

"Peace Is Hell" ends with the image of one US peacekeeper in Bosnia shouting: "Enemies, come on! Come on!" For Langewiesche, this soldier "was like the Army as a whole. He was standing behind a fence, peering into the night, well fed and safe, and good at his job. He was big, and strong, and heavily armed. But after nearly a decade of peace he was unsettled by the lack of front lines."

Well, the enemies did show up, and America’s armed forces are no longer "unsettled by the lack of front lines." The nation faces a multiplicity of them now, stretching from Colombia through the Middle East and Afghanistan clear on to Southeast Asia and the Philippines. If the Balkans were burdensome, the global landscape post-9/11 is immensely more taxing, even without the Bush White House’s clamor for yet another frontline in Iraq.

Given the massive outlays required to prosecute an open-ended global war against terrorists, September 2002 is a particularly inopportune moment to pick a fight with Saddam Hussein. But this hasn’t deterred American jihadists such as Atlantic editor Michael Kelly. He’s been stumping for war with Iraq all summer in the pages of the Washington Post — the lack of real links between Iraq and 9/11 or the overtaxed military his magazine once fretted about be damned.

In the October 2002 Atlantic, Kelly draws his line in the sand right over Ground Zero. "The great running tension now in policy and politics, and in the public discussion of policy and politics, is not so much between left and right, or even between Democrat and Republican, but between those who understand 9/11 as a dividing line and those who do not."

In government circles, President George W. Bush and the hawkish advisers speaking for him in recent weeks appear almost blasŽ about waging war on Iraq. White House speeches and administration members’ Sunday TV talk-show appearances convey the message: "Yes, world, we’ll ‘consult’ you — before we do it all by ourselves, and maybe with that chap Tony."

At times, the level of seriousness exhibited by Iraq hawks dips disturbingly low. White House chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr., for example, seems to place the Bush administration’s view of a "regime change" in Iraq on a par with launching a new fall comedy series. "From a marketing point of view," Card told the New York Times, in an article published September 7, "you don’t introduce new products in August."

Yet rarely do those in favor of an Iraqi adventure mention just what’s left on America’s plate. Underlying the 9/11 rhetoric and ginned-up Iraqi "threat" is a simple logic: "Can’t find bin Laden or Mullah Omar? Bomb the guy we can find."

When it comes to global conflict, however, America has a surplus of "product" already on hand — and the merchandise’s popularity is sinking fast. A poll released last week by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that the public’s positive assessment of US military efforts against terrorism has dropped substantially over the past year. In October 2001, 80 percent of those polled by the Pew Research Center felt that the war on terrorism was going "very well" or "fairly well." That number has now dipped to 65 percent — with 22 percent asserting that the war effort was not going well at all. Only 15 percent of those polled by the group believed that the centerpiece of the war on terrorism — the Afghan campaign — was a success, and a full 70 percent said that it was "too early to tell."

With numbers like that, and with so much left undone from 9/11, sending a new autumn line of camouflage and gas masks down the catwalk has all the market appeal — and logic — of peddling fur coats in the blazing desert heat.