Robert Farley argues that advocates for interventions in Syria and Iran are overestimating the effectiveness of airpower, and they are learning the wrong lesson from the Libyan war:

The case of Libya demonstrates that airpower enthusiasts will always have a lesson at hand to mislearn, and an example at the ready to misapply to the next disastrous war. We now have nearly 100 years of history to demonstrate that airpower cannot conjure up the outcomes we want, when we want them. Yet pundits desirous of regime change in Iran and Syria still grasp for the thin reeds that the promise of airpower can provide.

Why does airpower continue to be so appealing to interventionists? Farley explains:

More important is the mystique that airpower continues to hold — and somehow manages to regain after even the most qualified success. It bears emphasis that the enchantment of airpower is a direct result of the privileged position that our national security bureaucracy accords it. By creating a separate service with strategic writ and a guaranteed seat at the table, the national security reformers of 1947 ensured that generations of strategic discussions in the United States would revolve around the utility of airpower. Built around the idea of policing the world through strategic bombing, the U.S. Air Force through its very existence lends a hand to any pundit interested in making a case for cheap, easy, painless war against distant foes.

Part of what makes these wars seem painless (at least for the government waging them) is the confidence built up over the last twenty years that airstrikes can be carried out with impunity. Between no-fly zones in Iraq and the Balkans, the air wars against Serbia and now Libya, and the drone wars in Pakistan and elsewhere, many American pundits and politicians seem to be accustomed to the idea that airstrikes don’t result in American casualties and the states or groups targeted have no meaningful ability to retaliate against them. As Farley will remember, during the recent war in Libya the ability to strike Libyan targets with impunity was so great that it provided the basis for the outrageous idea that U.S. forces were not really engaged in hostilities. I suspect that the ability to strike with impunity has led many people to misunderstand what an attack on Iran or even Syria would involve and what the consequences would be.