C. Sokolowski,
I don't want to set you up a straw man or underestimate the idiocy of military intelligence but I just have one question for the group: Has the military come up with any credible evidence that those two particular buildings could be confused? If this was just a story about targeting the wrong building it wouldn't be such a problem, but there are many buildings in that town (at the moment) and this is one you go a long way to avoid. Of all the kinds of buildings you try and safeguard against bombing, the embassies of countries not involved in the fight are pretty much number one on the list. To make *a* targeting mistake while bombing a city is horrible. To make *this* mistake is criminal.
Then let's get to specifics. These are laser-guided munitions fired on a city we have been bombing, and therefore taking pictures of, for months. It is not credible to say that we bombed from an old aerial map when we are making new aerial maps all the time. When NATO bombed the train it admitted it saw the train, but the train came in before they noticed. When NATO bombed the refugee convoy they admitted (finally) that they saw the trucks and tractors but thought they were military trucks. These are reasonable explanations of SNAFU and stupidity. They are also necessary because laser-guide munitions are among those that we have nice video for since the bombardier often lases the target with the use of a *camera*. Laser, after all, depends on *visible light*. *Somebody* was lasing that target and therefore somebody could see that target. That somebody, if in a plane (and that is the best hope NATO has of an excuse since a ground-based targeting laser would have to be in a short-range line of sight with the target, since this a city with tall buildings) had with him spy photos taken over the course of *months* identifying all the relevant buildings in the city by their aerial profile. That, after all, is what spy photos are for - to give air crews the ability, when firing sight-guided munitions, to distinguish the buildings you want to hit from the buildings you don't want to hit.
As for the benefits, frankly I think those are clear. This was a free shot at *the* major world power who was most vocally opposing us. The French got their embassy bombed when they were in that same position vis-a-vis Libya. Clinton bombed a Sudanese civilian installation inside a crowded city to get our minds off Monica Lewinsky. He needed a target in Africa after the embassy bombings and he just took one, without any adequate intelligence. The Chinese have spied on us (it seems), attracted unwanted attention to Clinton fund-raising, rebuffed a centerpiece of Clinton administration economic diplomacy (dissing Barshevsky in the bargain) and just generally embarrassed the Clinton regime with their uppity, uncivilized, commie behavior giving the Republicans a fear to monger and giving, if you can believe this, *Gary Bauer* the high ground on the human rights issue.
As if that wasn't enough, this bombing has assured that the U.N. are out of the peace deal, meaning it is the Chinese, and not the Americans, who will scuttle the possibility of Milosovic getting the kind of peace force we didn't want to give him. The NATO-versus-U.N. - led force issue has only been a sticking point from the word "go" on this thing. How was the Clinton administration supposed to insist on a NATO-led force if Russia brought an eminently signable deal to the U.N., as it looked like they might do?
And these were only the provocations we know about. Suppose the Chinese were into some skullduggery that we don't know about. How better to send a message and get away with it clean? Frankly, the more I think of this and see all the head-scratching and dismissing of the idea this might have been deliberate, the more I admire that evil redneck for his ingenuity.
peace