MM,
A couple of comments on your response.
I think the fact civilians were spared to a large extent in WWI was because forces dug in early on and got stuck in the mud, so to speak.
Although I will again stress that I am not a military historian, and stand ready to be corrected, I would offer another explanation: civilians were spared in WWI because (thanks partially to what Wm. O'Neill has called the "bureaucratization of violence") for more than two centuries in Europe it had been traditional in wars between states to spare them. Armies fought armies, not civilians. One no longer "took cities", but fought "in the field." (Hence looting, pillaging, raping, murdering, and enslaving civilians were out, too.) That is why the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War (you remember the famous Picasso painting) came as such a shock.
On the NATO operation in Yugoslavia, you write:
I believe our involvement and tactics were driven by civilians (not by the best available military advice) for purely political considerations.
Of course. And one political consideration was: minimize military casualties, at all costs. (Thus: don't send in ground troops, but step up the bombing.)
The Gulf War:
FWIW, I think Bush made the best decision by not pushing on. He made a lot of promises to put that coalition together -- to act outside its scope would have been the diplomatic equivalent of "Read my lips....."
IMO, backing off after all those comparisons of Saddam Hussein with Adolf Hitler looked pretty darned odd. The question involuntarily presented itself: would we have left Hitler in power, because we were afraid that Germany would fall apart, and a source of "stability" in the region might be lost? And speaking of other coalition members, I'll admit to being not as conversant with the history of the Iraq War as I should be, but I do seem to remember reading that Saudi Arabia, for one, was ticked off when we backed off. I also remember commentators saying, when we had that big inspection blow-up with Saddam back in 1997, that the general feeling in the Arab world then was: "Get him or forget him." (Nice phrase, anyway.)
None of this endless cat-and-mouse -- the sanctions, the periodic bombings, etc. -- seems to hurt the indestructible Saddam; but it sure hurts the civilian population, which has already suffered at his hands more than anyone else. We have been victimizing the victim, in short. And for what?
Chechnya. You are quite right when you say that Chechnya is a somewhat different, and that:
I'm not sure Russia would use much of the "good stuff" on Chechnya. I suspect Russia is quite pleased to "punish" Chechnya and let the CBUs fall where they may.
The point is that for a long time Putin and the Generals justified their campaign by claiming that they were, in fact, "following NATO's strategy" in Chechnya: using "surgical strikes" against "rebel bases" and "civilian infrastructure," but not hurting a single "peaceful citizen." (Reports about deaths of civilians were dismissed as "enemy propaganda.")
Fact is, of course, that they have very few weapons capable of executing "surgical strikes," and that they have been throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the place. That is becoming increasingly obvious even to the Russian public -- a large part of which, incidentally, doesn't give a damn anyway, because they would just as soon see all Chechens wiped out, not just the "criminals" among them, at whose hands, here again, the Chechens themselves have suffered more than anyone else. Yet another case of victimizing the victim.
One of the things that shocks Westerners most is the fact that Russia routinely argues that NATO was more to be condemned, because it bombed a foreign country; while Russia is bombing its own citizens, on its own territory. At first, this seems bizarre: governments are expected to be nicer to their own citizens than to the citizens of other countries. But it does reflect reality: civil wars are practically always bloodier and more vicious than interstate conflicts.
Difference between draftees and professionals.
I make no distinction between draftees and enlistees. Once you're a soldier (or whatever), you're a soldier. Bit hard to sort that out during "business hours."
I'll have to defer to you on this one, since you obviously have actual military experience, and I do not. But I am not quite sure you understood my point, which may be because I did not state it clearly enough. My point was that a political leader might -- and perhaps ought to -- draw a distinction between the two. Seems to me to make political sense to spare, as much as possible, your draftees -- many of whom were drafted because they did not have the money and/or the smarts and/or the connections to get out of it.
I really should not have contrasted "draftees" to "volunteers" or "enlistees," who may have joined up to fight a particular war they believed in. Properly, I should have contrasted them to the "professionals": i.e., those people who selected military service as a career, knowing the risks, and accepting them in advance.
Joan
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