Ronald Bailey on Why Bombing Syria Isn't Likely to Work
"Air power is an unusually seductive form of military strength, in part because, like modern courtship, it appears to offer gratification without commitment," the political scientist Eliot Cohen wrote in 1994. President Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress seem poised to succumb to the seductions of air power as they try to fashion some way to stop Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad from using chemical weapons against his opponents. Will our politicians be gratified? Can they avoid commitment? Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey reports that the political science literature suggests not.