Cui bono?

The question of who benefits from a military response to Syria is what I've been trying to raise in the last couple of posts.  James Fallows and Franklin Spinney address this question in two separate articles.  Here are the relevant excerpts.

For 20 years now we have seen this pattern:

1. Something terrible happens somewhere -- and what is happening in Syria is not just   terrible but atrocious in the literal meaning of that term.
2. Americans naturally feel we must "do something."
3. The easiest something to do involves bombers, drones, and cruise missiles, all of which are promised to be precise and to keep our forces and people at a safe remove from the battle zone.
4. In the absence of a draft, with no threat that taxes will go up to cover war costs, and with the reality that modern presidents are hamstrung in domestic policy but have enormous latitude in national security, the normal democratic checks on waging war don't work.
5. We "do something," with bombs and drones, and then deal with blowback and consequences "no one could have foreseen."

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.

Is this strategy working? Just ask yourself a version of Ronald Reagan’s famous question to President Carter in the 1980 election debate: ‘Is our country better off now than it was before this madness shook itself from the moderating shackles of the Cold War twenty some years ago?’ That the NATO alliance of 780 million people eventually prevailed over Serbia, a country of ten million with a gross domestic product equal to two-thirds that of Fairfax County, Virginia, is hardly a precedent to celebrate, particularly since it proved so spectacularly that the marriage of coercive diplomacy to limited precision bombardment is a colossal failure. 


Polls make it clear that a majority of the American people oppose another war in the Middle East.  Nevertheless, the New York Times reports that high officials in the Obama White House now want the American people to believe the Kosovo debacle is a precedent to justify a another drive-by-shooting campaign to coerce Bashar Assad in behaving the way we want him to behave.

 When faced with such lunacy, perhaps it is time to ask the question.

Cui bono?