First, after 10,000 sorties, what's left to hit? Secondly, what's the point of bombing a factory that makes the worst cars in the world -- the Yugo -- when the misery is a hundred miles away in Kosovo? And how about this: If this campaign has been so successful at degrading the Yugoslav Army, why are there nearly a million people -- imagine Rochester, N.Y. emptied on foot -- now homeless?

    If this is winning, I'd hate to see losing.

    ***

    Important disclaimers time. First, the difference between a hobby magazine and being a front-line journalist is access to facts. My figure on 10,000 sorties, with half being bombing runs, is just an educated guess, taking the average number of sorties reported on the NATO daily briefings by the number of days of operations.

   The relevant statistic, of course, isn't the number of bombing runs but the tonnage of bombs dropped, which should probably be a military secret, but it'll show up sometime from an idiot press officer trying to score points. A safe guess there would be that if it takes four 500-pound bombs to level a city block, the amount dumped so far would completely flatten my home town of Richmond, Va.

    The second disclaimer here is that if this was the standard Internet site where opinions pull double-duty as facts, then I'd just be screaming "Horseshit! This is complete horseshit!" at the top of my lungs. This site tries to show how the web can handle news in a different way; that to establish credibility virtually, it helps to have a sense of where the writer is coming from.

   People forget the idea of objective journalism is a relatively new phenomena -- for hundreds of years there weren't reporters, there were observers. Think about it: I could go to work for the Charlotte Observer and not be able to observe; only report.

    The final disclaimer is a historical fact that will sound like an opinion and a slam, but is not. In war, armies lie. Period, graph, that simple, because it's not in their best interest to tell the truth. It's in their best interest to win. Winston Churchill put it best: "Truth is so valuable, sometimes it needs a bodyguard of lies."

    In World War II, American tanks were no match for German tanks (they were nicknamed Ronson's after a popular cigarette lighter) and the story went uncovered -- you think anybody's going to join the tank corps knowing they are bringing a knife to a gunfight? The lies about Viet Nam were so prevalent it led to the downfall of a president, and just as we had the coverup over Agent Orange in Nam, we got nerve gas coverup lies after Desert Storm.

    So when it comes to this latest NATO campaign, I can tell you there are lies even though it will likely be years before we know what they are. That's okay. There's one lie that's already clear to me.

    The idea we are winning.

    ***

    What I want to see in the mainstream media is a serious examination of the targets and the logic behind those targets. So far, we've hit four embassies, killed a three-year-old girl who was sitting on her potty, and used top-secret carbon-filament bombs to temporarily knock out a power plant only to come back later and blast it away with conventional weapons. I'd like to know about Joe Serbski, an autoworker who bolts left-front fenders for a living, and I'd like to know why making him unemployed has something to do with genocide a hundred miles away.

    What I want to see from the mainstream media is a look at all the press release crap put out by defense contractors over the years about the all-weather capability of our figher planes, and why every time it rains in Yugoslavia we can't find our targets. At least we know NATO will never attack Microsoft; too much rain for air operations around Seattle.

    And finally, what I'd like to see from the mainstream media is an ability to appreciate our intelligence. Anyone reading this could spot what's a fact, what's a guess, and what's an opinion. Why this could only appear on an op-ed page makes no sense at all to me.

   Garrison Keillor once said he got out of journalism because all the stuff he was proud of was the stuff that was always getting cut out. Boy, can I relate.

   So, to all. Find the right words that can stop this mess.

   ***