Having spent easter in northern Italy with the sound of Nato bombers screaming overhead, I travelled back to Sweden through Germany. There, a number of retired generals were speaking out. Gerd Schmueckle, who was wounded six times on the Russian front during the second world war, but then served in the highest positions inside Nato, warned of a new fascination with war. Perhaps, he said, it is a question of generations. When the war veterans are losing their hair and teeth, and disappearing into homes for the elderly, the new generation suddenly has a different attitude towards war.
For Schmueckle, war was associated with horror beyond imagination, leaving deep psychological scars on individuals and nations. Bombs, he said, do not create peace; instead, they breed hatred for years, perhaps for generations.
Younger politicians believe that they can fight new types of wars. And these new wars are becoming increasingly popular. Indeed, they are now conducted a couple of times a year. They are supposed to be clean wars: high-rhetoric, high-altitude and high-technology wars; smart bombs for smart politicians. The third way in war.
These smart wars can be used to beef up diplomacy when it runs into problems which seem too complicated. But they can also be used to replace diplomacy entirely and just express the outrage that we feel over evil regimes doing evil things.
It's evil, isn't it? No one can really defend the outrageous acts of a Saddam Hussein or a Slobodan Milosevic. Well then, it can't be wrong to bomb them.
So in the west, we are in the strange situation that instead of cashing in our peace dividend, we are on the verge of running out of cruise missiles, or at least the air-launched version. The smart wars are beginning to take their toll on war stores.
The problem with these smart wars conducted from the air is that they are often difficult to relate to political objectives, and so far have not proved a great success in achieving those objectives. In Baghdad, there are no longer any UN inspectors to look for weapons of mass destruction, but Saddam Hussein is still there. Wasn't it supposed to be the other way around?
In Kosovo, the aim of the smart war was to keep the Albanians in Kosovo and get rid of Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade. So far, it has turned out to be the other way around. The air war against Yugoslavia has not prevented a humanitarian catastrophe; rather, it has become associated with one.
The air war against Serbia will not only be a war over the future of Kosovo, but also a war over the future of smart wars and the use of air power in isolation. If Milosevic throws in the towel and agrees to all the Nato demands, smart wars will be here to stay, to be used whenever diplomacy runs into too many complications.
But if the air war turns out to be a prolonged phase of wanton destruction and humanitarian disaster preceding a reluctant decision by Nato to mount a ground offensive against Kosovo (and take responsibility for a long-term occupation of part of the Balkans), the future of smart wars will be very different.
We are now seeing the refighting of the war of words over the use of air power in the Bosnian conflict. In that war, Washington was always arguing that a few volleys of cruise missiles and strategic strikes would sort out the problem, while others argued that this would only aggravate the situation on the ground and worsen the plight of exposed civilians and UN-peace-keeping troops.
More specifically, the emotional debate about the responsibility for the massacre of Muslims after the fall of the UN-declared safe area of Srebrenica in July 1995 turned on whether it was Nato or the UN which had prevented air strikes.
This presumes that air strikes could have stopped the Serb soldiers marching in. In Kosovo, massive Nato air strikes have clearly done nothing to prevent or limit the Serb onslaught on the Kosovo Albanians. It certainly felt nice to see the good missiles heading for their evil targets. But one day we may discover that the massacres in Kosovo during the days and nights when Nato was striking from the sky were even worse than the terrible war crimes in Srebrenica.
We must learn again the lessons of war and power; we must painfully start to reread Clausewitz and Moltke and all those who learnt about war and power the hard way. Perhaps there are no smart wars, even in our smart age.
