Toward Dresden.

When bombing goes too far.

The air war against Yugoslavia promises to stretch well into summer. Bill Clinton, sounding ever more like the beleaguered Lyndon Johnson, has declared that "our plan is to persist until we prevail."

Given a sound strategy, a commander in chief endowed with determination can serve the nation well-think of Abraham Lincoln persevering through the bloody spring and summer of 1864. More commonly, persistence masks conceptual bankruptcy. In this instance, Clinton's plaintive call for patience is a hastily contrived fig leaf, concealing his abandonment of one defective strategy for another, one that is both militarily suspect and morally problematic.

Once it became apparent that the jangling of NATO's saber hadn't scared the Serbs, an embarrassed alliance-including a conspicuously discomfited White House-grabbed for another approach: perhaps bludgeoning them might work.

Thus the strategy of attrition in which the president now vows to persist. One direct result has been a dramatic and continuing buildup of military assets committed against Yugoslavia, with the United States providing the lion's share of reinforcements. The Theodore Roosevelt has arrived to bolster NATO's air armada. Attack helicopters and rocket batteries of the U.S. Army have been deployed to Albania, promising more firepower still to hammer the Serbs. With 900 aircraft already engaged in the allied offensive, NATO commander Wesley Clark insists that his air campaign requires "vastly increased assets" and has asked for still more aircraft. Secretary of defense William Cohen promises that Clark will get whatever he needs.

Lifting a page out of Robert McNamara's playbook, military planners at NATO headquarters and in the Pentagon have incrementally expanded the list of targets that allied warplanes and missiles are authorized to attack: It begins with air defenses, military installations, and airfields; moves on to command-and-control facilities, government buildings, and storage depots; and now includes bridges, industrial enterprises, oil refineries, and Serbia's electrical grid. Almost imperceptibly, NATO's definition of what constitutes a legitimate "military" target has become more elastic. In Serbia, allied warplanes have demolished a food-processing plant, battered the factory that manufactures the Yugo automobile, and knocked Serbian radio and television stations off the air. Montenegro, Yugoslavia's pro-Western "other" republic, which has played no role in the Kosovo war, has likewise been the target of allied attack.

Inevitably, easing the restrictions on bombing has begun to dull allied sensitivity to collateral damage and civilian casualties. Americans are warming to the idea that their quarrel is not simply with Yugoslavia's government and military forces but with the Serbian people themselves. An article in that bellwether of elite opinion, The New Republic, has branded Serbs "Milosevic's willing executioners," lumping them with Germans complicit in the Holocaust. The "relative absence of effective Serbian protest," writes Stacy Sullivan, raises "disturbing questions about the culpability of Serbs as a whole."

As the allies deplete their stocks of precision munitions, they resort to less accurate methods and munitions. For example, the U.S. is now delivering loads of "dumb bombs" from B-52s. As this effort intensifies, the number of bombs going astray increases, devastating houses and apartment buildings, not to mention buses, passenger trains, and refugee convoys unfortunate enough to appear at the wrong place at the wrong time. As the war entered its third week, NATO was already shrugging off reports that allied attacks had reduced a good part of Pristina, the Kosovan capital, to rubble.

The bombing of Pristina, like the bombing of Belgrade and other Serbian cities, has done nothing to relieve the plight of the refugees displaced by Milosevic. Nor has it disrupted even momentarily efforts by Serbian forces to purge Kosovo of its ethnic-Albanian population. Through seven weeks, the bombing has been demonstrably ineffective- persuading the Clinton White House of the imperative to bomb some more. Thus are the operational implications of "persistence" beginning to make themselves clear: not to protect the Kosovars from further abuse, but to pound Serbia into submission through a campaign of unremitting and increasingly indiscriminate violence.

According to some critics, NATO's determination to rely exclusively on air power dooms this campaign to failure. But the notion that "strategic bombing" alone cannot achieve decisive results has as much standing as Thomas Friedman's now-infamous claim that nations harboring McDonald's will never go to war with one another.

Employed with sufficient ruthlessness, air power just might make the Serbs crack, thereby permitting the White House and the Pentagon to persist in the pretense that Operation Allied Force has unfolded according to plan. Yet whatever the professed intentions of its architects, such a campaign will inevitably target the people of Serbia no less-perhaps eventually more-than their army and government. Of course allied air power can "prevail" in Yugoslavia: All that's required is to turn Serbia into a smoking ruin.

Thus does the show of resolve currently on display in Washington and Brussels gradually eclipse ethical considerations. In pursuit of a just cause there may be justification for putting noncombatants in jeopardy. But when military "strategy" derives from political timidity and bureaucratic dissembling rather than a determination to end a war expeditiously, that justification disappears. Killing and maiming Serbian civilians because pusillanimous leaders cannot summon the courage to order the ground offensive necessary to win the war is simply wrong.

We should not deceive ourselves: The longer NATO adheres to its strategy of attrition through sustained air attack, the greater the risk that the alliance's military actions will undermine the morality of a war launched in a haze of pious rhetoric, of the "never again" variety.

In so following Bill Clinton to victory in Yugoslavia, we will have sold our souls. As the culmination of the decade of moral confusion that is the age of Clinton, such an outcome might seem appropriate. But it will only compound the Balkan tragedy, in which the United States with each passing day becomes more complicit.

Mr. Bacevich is professor of international relations at Boston University.