From: imbibe@mindspring.com   
      
   Bombing Kyiv Into Submission? History Says It Won’t Work.   
   By Max Fisher, Oct. 11, 2022, NY Times   
      
   President Putin of Russia, in ordering missile strikes on Kyiv and other   
   Ukrainian cities, follows a long line of wartime leaders who have sought to   
   cow their adversaries by bombing enemy capitals.   
      
   Ever since Nazi Germany’s bombardment of London in WWII, enabled by the   
   first long-range missiles and warplanes, nearly every major war has featured   
   similar attacks.   
      
   The goal is almost always the same: to coerce the targeted country’s leaders   
   into scaling back their war effort or suing for peace.   
      
   It typically aims to achieve this by forcing those leaders to ask whether the   
   capital’s cultural landmarks and economic functioning are worth putting on   
   the line — and also, especially, by terrorizing the country’s population   
   into moderating their    
   support for the war.   
      
   But for as long as leaders have pursued this tactic, they have watched it   
   repeatedly fail.   
      
   More than that, such strikes tend to backfire, deepening the political and   
   public resolve for war that they are meant to erode — even galvanizing the   
   attacked country into stepping up its war aims.   
      
   The victorious allies in WWII did emphasize a strategy of heavily bombing   
   cities, which is part of why countries have come to repeat this so many times   
   since. Cities including Dresden and Tokyo were devastated, killing hundreds of   
   thousands of civilians    
   and forcing millions into homelessness.   
      
   Still, historians generally now argue that, even if that did play some role in   
   exhausting those countries, it was largely because of damage to German and   
   Japanese industrial output rather than the terror it caused. Axis countries   
   were also aggressive in    
   bombing enemy cities, casting further doubt on notions that the strategy could   
   be a decisive factor on its own.   
      
   And any WWII lessons may be of limited utility in understanding the wars that   
   came after, as countries quickly learned from that conflict to move military   
   production away from city centers. Tellingly, such bombing has seldom worked   
   since.   
      
   American war planners discovered this in the Korean War, when bombing   
   Pyongyang only hardened the North’s commitment. A decade later, they tried   
   it again in Vietnam. But an internal Pentagon report concluded that striking   
   Hanoi, the North Vietnamese    
   capital, had been “in retrospect, a colossal misjudgment.”   
      
   Iran and Iraq struck each other’s capitals during their 80s conflict to try   
   to force one side to back down. Instead, both nations were rallied by watching   
   foreign bombs fall on civilian neighborhoods, helping to stretch the war to   
   nearly a decade.   
      
   Insurgent groups have likewise adapted this tactic, to little more success.   
      
   Northern Irish groups struck repeatedly in London, hoping to dispel British   
   commitment to the territory. Instead, the bombings led to more severe measures   
   by British authorities in Northern Ireland. Palestinian groups that ignited   
   bus and cafe bombs in    
   Israeli cities during a period of conflict in the 2000s found much the same   
   result.   
      
   Al Qaeda’s justification for the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks has shifted,   
   but the group has said that one aim was to compel American withdrawal from the   
   Middle East. But Americans, rather than rising up against their country’s   
   overseas deployments    
   as Al Qaeda leaders had hoped, rallied in support of invading Afghanistan and   
   then Iraq.   
      
   Though each conflict is different, this pattern is not a coincidence, but is   
   explained by the politics as well as the psychology of warfare. And both   
   appear to apply in Russia’s war in Ukraine.   
      
   Capital strikes intended to push a government toward conciliation or retreat   
   instead do much to close off those options.   
      
   In practice, such attacks tell targeted leaders that they, and perhaps the   
   very existence of their government, will not be secure until they eliminate   
   the threat through outright victory. They will tend to escalate in response,   
   rather than back down as    
   their attackers hope.   
      
   And a negotiated peace, like the one Mr. Putin has urged, becomes harder for   
   those leaders to enter because it means accepting that the threat to the   
   capital will remain.   
      
   The public will often reach the same calculus, coming to see their attacker as   
   an implacable threat that can only be neutralized through defeat.   
      
   The stiffening resolve inspired by such strikes can be equal parts strategic   
   and emotional.   
      
   German rocket and air attacks on British cities during WWII, known as the   
   Blitz, aimed to degrade British production as well as public support for the   
   war, so that Britain would agree to withdraw from the conflict.   
      
   And German leaders had hoped that turning whole blocks of London into rubble   
   would inspire Britons to turn against the leaders who insisted on staying in   
   the war. But British approval of their government rose to near 90 percent.   
      
   The United States has stumbled on this effect several times, but perhaps most   
   powerfully in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, when it sought to force back its   
   Communist adversaries by bombing their towns and cities. Instead, the   
   campaigns convinced those    
   governments, as well as their populations, that they could only be safe by   
   defeating the Americans for good, whatever the cost.   
      
   Washington was seeking to reproduce its victories in WWII, which came after   
   laying waste to German and Japanese cities from the air. Though the atomic   
   bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were once widely thought to have terrified   
   Japan into surrender,    
   some historians have since cast doubt on that view.   
      
   In Vietnam, American forces began bombing northern cities in 1966 with the   
   explicit goals of “deterioration of popular morale” and to “put pressure   
   on the Hanoi leadership to terminate the war,” according to a 1972   
   Congressional review of    
   Pentagon documents.   
      
   Instead, the strikes helped lock Northern Vietnamese leaders into a strategy   
   of expelling the Americans who were dropping bombs on their cities, Pentagon   
   officials concluded privately.   
      
   The attacks also so angered North Vietnam’s allies in Moscow and Beijing   
   that those countries increased their military aid beyond what the bombers had   
   destroyed, Pentagon analysts said.   
      
      
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