... please read this article by Chuck Spinney, out today in Counterpunch. (And before you ask: No, I don't agree with everything in Counterpunch, nor every view of Spinney's, nor even everything in the Atlantic. But I do agree with this.)

Spinney, whom I have known and respected for his national-security views since I wrote about him in National Defense, makes an important specific point and an even more important general one.

The specific point concerns the "Kosovo model," the idea that the Clinton-era bombing campaign on Kosovo illustrates how pinpoint, punitive strikes might succeed in Syria. Spinney begins his piece thus:

I found it truly scary to read that some high officials in the Obama Administration are so disconnected from reality that they consider the 1999 war in Kosovo to be a precedent for justifying limited cruise missile strikes in Syria.

He goes on to explain how oversimplified he considers the current "Kosovo worked!" version of history to be. For instance:

In 1999, U.S. military planners and the Clinton Administration predicted that a “precision” bombing campaign would coerce Slobodan Milošević into resolving the Kosovo Crisis by complying with NATO demands after only two to three days of precision bombardment. But the air campaign ground on for seventy-eight grueling days... Milošević did not react like a predictable mechanical thermostat. He chose instead to escalate rapidly–whereupon the “carefully calibrated” limited bombing campaign aimed at changing one man’s behavior exploded into a general war against the Serbian people. NATO had expanded the target list to include the Serbian power grid, chemical plants, Danube bridges, TV stations, and civilian infrastructure, not to mention military targets in Kosovo. Predictably, the war settled into a grinding siege of attrition, and planners worried about running out of cruise missiles.

Fred Kaplan of Slate, whom I also know and respect, has a more positive net assessment of the Kosovo campaign. But he too emphasizes its imprecision and ambiguity -- and even if you grant his version, I think Spinney is right about the larger pathology of U.S. military response through the post-Soviet era. He says it comes from the "marriage of two fatally-flawed ideas":

* 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. * 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.

That sounds polemical but to me seems accurate. For 20 years now we have seen this pattern: