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Analysts say punitive airstrikes rarely work
Past bomb, missile attacks by U.S. achieved little, warn some experts
WASHINGTON — The type of limited, punitive military campaign being contemplated against Syria has failed to deter U.S. adversaries in the past, and at times emboldened them, military analysts say.
In two major episodes in 1998, the U.S. government unleashed a combination of bombs and cruise missiles against its major adversaries — Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida and the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. In a third case, in 1986, the U.S. bombed the Libyan regime of Moammar Gadhafi.
The bombs and missiles mostly hit their targets, and the U.S. military at the time declared the attacks successful. But in the end, they achieved little.
Two years after the U.S. bombed Libya, Gadhafi’s government ordered the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 people. Al-Qaida killed nearly 3,000 Americans in September 2001. Saddam kicked out international weapons inspectors and defied international sanctions until the U.S. deposed him in 2003 in an expensive, costly war whose benefit to theU.S remains uncertain.
“Many air power theorists had long cautioned against using air power in penny-packets or in hyperconstrained political environments,” wrote Mark Conversino, associate dean of the U.S. Air War College, in a 2005 paper concluding that Operation Desert Fox, the 1998 attack on Iraq, ultimately did not accomplish its goals.
Yet presidents continue to do so. And now President Barack Obama is said to be contemplating a limited series of cruise missile strikes in response to the apparent chemical weapons attack lastweek on civilians by the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad.
Military analysts are warning about the limits of such an approach.
“If the U.S. does something and Assad is left standing ... without having suffered real serious, painful enough damage, the U.S looks weak and foolish,” said Eliot Cohen, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies who has long been skeptical about relying on air power.
“Can you do damage with cruise missiles? Yes,” said Anthony Cordesman, military analyst with the Center for Strategic & International Studies, a Washington think tank. “Can you stop them from having chemical weapons capability? I would think the answer would be no. Should you limit yourself to just a kind of incremental retaliation? That doesn’t serve any strategic purpose. It doesn’t protect the Syrian people, it doesn’t push Assad out.”
In August 1998, days after al-Qaida bombed American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people, including 12 Americans, President Bill Clinton signed off on plans to target bin Laden with cruise missiles, and the U.S. fired 75 of them into terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.
Operation Infinite Reach also targeted a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan that U.S. officials thought was making chemical weapons. Later evidence cast doubt on that claim.
Bin Laden canceled a planned meeting at one of the bombing sites, and he and many of his top lieutenants escaped unharmed. Documents declassified in 2008 suggested the strikes may have brought al-Qaida and the Taliban closer politically and ideologically.
A few months later, in December 1998, Clinton ordered Operation Desert Fox, designed to “strike military targets in Iraq that contributed to its ability to produce, store, maintain, and deliver weapons of mass destruction,” according to a Pentagon history.
Later evidence showed Saddam had shelved most of his WMD programs by then, but the attacks were considered a military success, having inflicted serious damage on Iraq’s missile development program.
However, Saddam’s regime survived, he ended U.N. weapons inspections, and the attacks weakened the international sanctions against him, analysts say.
“The lure of achieving a bloodless yet devastating military victory while making a rapid exit possible,” Conversino wrote, “led to the misapplication and abuse of air power.”