Saturday, August 31, 2013

Remembering ...

Much talk about what we can do to get Syria's attention without getting involved in a bogged-down war on the ground. Probably most of you don't remember that we got involved in a similar way when the government of Serbia in Belgrade was backing the genocidal Serbs in Kosovo.

The other DrC and I had an amazing experience as part of a river cruise down the Danube, which contrary to the waltz is not, in any way, blue. We spent a day in Belgrade and as a part of our city tour were shown a large, tallish building in the heart of the city that had been bombed to smithereens.

This building had been the headquarters of the Serbian military, their version of the Pentagon. The buildings all around it were intact, although I expect many broken windows had been replaced. The U.S. Air Force had picked that one building out of an entire city and destroyed it, leaving the buildings all around it essentially untouched.

If we can do something like that to Assad, blow his military headquarters all to heck without leveling the city, I believe we could get his attention and convince him to stop using poison gas.

The bombing in Belgrade was done by piloted F-15 or F-16s. I don't know if the Tomahawk cruise missiles Obama proposes to use in Syria have that degree of accuracy, I'd like to think they do.