Even as some military experts in the academic world suggest more vicious bombing be considered, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was only the latest international leader to serve notice that the US will suffer far-reaching consequences if it starts hitting targets that kill civilians and destroys infrastructure.
Annan's comments came as US officials reacted cautiously to reports that a marketplace in Baghdad had been damaged by an explosion that left 14 people dead.
At the Pentagon, Major General Stanley McChrystal said American forces had not aimed any ordnance at that neighborhood in the Iraqi capital. While officials could not absolutely rule out an errant American bomb or missile, they also said the explosion might have been caused by Iraqi antiaircraft fire falling back to earth or a faulty Iraqi missile.
"We do know for a fact that something landed in the Shaab district," McChrystal said. "But we do not know if it was US or Iraqi. We do know that we did not target anything in the vicinity."
Proponents of air power have argued, almost since the invention of the modern warplane, that victory could be achieved through the air by attacking enemy leaders, communications and the "centers of gravity" that prop up their governments.
For this war with Iraq, the air campaign had been designed to open the offensive and set the stage for the ground attack. But that sequence had to be reversed after US President George W. Bush ordered the surprise missile strike last Wednesday in an effort to kill Saddam and top Iraqi leaders.
McChrystal said that since the war began, more than 600 cruise missiles and 4,300 other precision-guided munitions have been launched at Iraq. But a week into the war, air power experts acknowledge that the Pentagon's current bomb and missile campaign failed to deliver a quick knockout blow -- though that could still happen.
In recent days, the air campaign shifted from mostly pre-planned strikes against leadership targets and command or communications centers to attacks on Iraq's forces in the field, specifically the Republican Guard divisions.
Any analysis of the air campaign by anyone outside the most senior military commands and civilian leadership is, naturally, based on a hodgepodge of television images, scattered eyewitness reports from the front and a sense of history.
"Many of the effects of air operations are cumulative," said Eliot Cohen, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who directed the Air Force's definitive study of the first war against Iraq.
"At any given time, you may think you're not doing very much but, suddenly, when the right pressures come together, the other guy collapses," Cohen said.
But he cautioned that the public's view of the air war is "opaque, at best."
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