    12

    The resulting military force was so vast that it stretched farther

    than the eye could see.  Provisioning it with food and equipment took

    four years and the resources of an entire continent.24   Whenever the

    Persian host marched to a fresh campsite, it literally ate every available

    bit of food and drank every potable drop of water in expanses dozens

    of square miles in size.  Says Herodotus, "There was not a nation in

    Asia" the Persians didn't take with them.  And "save for the great rivers

    there was not a stream... [their army] drank from that was not drunk

    dry."25    The  folks  they  were  marching  to  conquer  couldn't  come

    anywhere near this logistic sophistication.

    But the barbarians the Persians considered beneath contempt

    won the war.  They were called the Greeks.  In the 490's B.C., years

    before the first major Persian-Greek war, when he was informed that

    the burning of Sardis had been pulled off by a landing party of

    Athenians, the exasperated Persian emperor Darius had been forced to

    ask, "Who are the Athenians?"26  Now, presumably, he knew.

    One hundred and fifty years later a Greek who even his fellow

    Greeks called a barbarian would conquer the entire Persian Empire.

    His name was Alexander the Great.

    The whole thing was as unlikely as the Vietnamese turning

    around and conquering the U.S.  But it happened.  In fact, in history it

    happens over and over again. It happened in 1870 when the French

    were forced to fight a country which just a few years earlier had been a

    disorganized clutter of rag-tag mini-states ruled by comic opera

    princes.  The land of Napoleon was rated by every armchair general as

    the mightiest military force on the Continent.  But France lost.  Its army

    was chopped up like ground round.  Its glorious capital, Paris, faced

    the humiliation of a foreign army marching down its streets.27  The

    upstart nation that had brought France to its knees was... Germany.

    An equally surprising fate occurred to England when it trained

    its guns on the superpowers of its day in two world wars.  When the

    smoke had cleared, two backward nations of Johnny-come-latelies

    ended up dominating the world.  These countries, whose inhabitants

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