Mark, you are exaggerating the magnitude of Linebacker II rather seriously. I don't have a precise figure for the Linebacker II bomb tonnage, but the total bomb tonnage on North Vietnam for the month of December 1972, including a significant amount of other bombing in addition to Linebacker II, was 36,244 tons. The total for the preceding seven years had been more than twenty times as large, 791,656 tons.
Linebacker II persuaded Hanoi to sign an agreement quite similar to the one Hanoi had been offering to sign before Linebacker II.
Professor Cole, I agree with your basic points: that air power cannot destroy an irregular force that operates in small groups that are hard to see from the air, and that the use of air power against such a force causes a lot of civilian casualties. But you are mistaken about a number of the historical details.
The attempt to kill Saddam Hussein by airstrike that caused the war to begin early did not occur at a restaurant. It was in a farming community outside Baghdad. The attempt to kill Saddam in a restaurant was a separate incident the following month.
The bombing of Baghdad, Mosul, and Kirkuk that followed the first assassination attempt could not reasonably be called "massive." It was relatively small in scale, not remotely comparable to the bombing the United States had done, for example, in the Vietnam War.
You even manage to exaggerate American bombing in the Vietnam War, which is not easy to do. This was the biggest bombing campaign in history. It made South Vietnam the most heavily bombed country in the history of the world, and Laos the second most heavily bombed. But "'carpet bombing,' using B-52s for wall to wall rolling strikes on the fields of the Vietnamese peasants" is an exaggeration.
Linebacker II was conducted mostly be B-52s dropping old-fashioned "dumb" bombs.
Mark, you are exaggerating the magnitude of Linebacker II rather seriously. I don't have a precise figure for the Linebacker II bomb tonnage, but the total bomb tonnage on North Vietnam for the month of December 1972, including a significant amount of other bombing in addition to Linebacker II, was 36,244 tons. The total for the preceding seven years had been more than twenty times as large, 791,656 tons.
Linebacker II persuaded Hanoi to sign an agreement quite similar to the one Hanoi had been offering to sign before Linebacker II.
Professor Cole, I agree with your basic points: that air power cannot destroy an irregular force that operates in small groups that are hard to see from the air, and that the use of air power against such a force causes a lot of civilian casualties. But you are mistaken about a number of the historical details.
The attempt to kill Saddam Hussein by airstrike that caused the war to begin early did not occur at a restaurant. It was in a farming community outside Baghdad. The attempt to kill Saddam in a restaurant was a separate incident the following month.
The bombing of Baghdad, Mosul, and Kirkuk that followed the first assassination attempt could not reasonably be called "massive." It was relatively small in scale, not remotely comparable to the bombing the United States had done, for example, in the Vietnam War.
You even manage to exaggerate American bombing in the Vietnam War, which is not easy to do. This was the biggest bombing campaign in history. It made South Vietnam the most heavily bombed country in the history of the world, and Laos the second most heavily bombed. But "'carpet bombing,' using B-52s for wall to wall rolling strikes on the fields of the Vietnamese peasants" is an exaggeration.