Versailles on the Potomac at it again

The brilliant Chuck Spinney has produced this outstanding analysis of how using Operation:ALLIED FORCE (1999) and other ill thought out U.S. efforts, have led us toward today's bad idea of launching a bombing campaign against Syria.

Most importantly, the miscalculations at the beginning of the Kosovo War, which as we have seen, were based in large part on a delusional misreading of the Bosnia precedent, proved that the political marriage between coercive diplomacy and limited precision bombardment is a loser.

However, instead of leading to a divorce, subsequent events in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia have reinforced Kosovo’s lesson not learned, and the result is what is now a clear psychopathic marriage of two fatally-flawed ideas.

1. Coercive diplomacy assumes that carefully calibrated doses of punishment will persuade any adversary, whether an individual terrorist or a national government, to act in a way that we would define as acceptable.

2. Limited precision bombardment assumes we can administer those doses precisely on selected “high-value” targets using guided weapons, fired from a safe distance, with no friendly casualties, and little unintended damage.

This marriage of pop psychology and bombing lionizes war on the cheap, and it increases our country’s addiction to strategically counterproductive drive-by shootings with cruise missiles and precision-guided bombs.

Consider the last twenty years: What has been achieved by using cruise missiles to bomb a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan and an obstacle course in Afghanistan, or the endless attacks on air defense sites in the Iraqi no fly zone in the 1990s, or the bombing campaigns of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars; and now Obama’s ever growing drone campaign in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and god knows where else?

While such precision-guided coercion operations may infatuate the foreign policy wonks, media elites, and feather the nests of defense contractors, the resulting strategy of drive by shootings has failed utterly to coerce the likes of Milošević, Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Qaddafi, or the Taliban to behave in ways our pol-mil apparachiks deem to be acceptable. Viewed from the receiving end, the grand strategic result has been to turn the United States into a kind of unfocused Murder Incorporated using techno-advantages to kill and terrorize whomever, wherever, and whenever it chooses.