WASHINGTON — NATO plans to step up attacks on the palaces, headquarters and communications centers that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi uses to maintain his grip on power in Libya, according to Obama administration and allied officials.

This "more energetic bombing campaign" included "a separate raid on Monday that temporarily knocked Libyan state television off the air."

As the Times' Thom Shanker and David Sanger explain:

Officials in Europe and Washington said the strikes were meant to reduce the Libyan government’s ability to harm civilians by eliminating, link by link, the command-and-communications and supply chains that are required for military operations.

That is obviously the justification you're going to hear from the people doing the bombing. Legally speaking, you are supposed to bomb targets that provide some military function--otherwise the attacks could be war crimes. Whether state television provides some concrete military advantage that would make journalists a legitimate target is a topic media outlets should discuss, for obvious reasons. But the Times seems willing to let the U.S./NATO explanations stand on their own.

But a more revealing admission comes later in the piece, when the Times talks about Kosovo and the lessons it teaches us about Libya:

Gen. John P. Jumper, who commanded United States Air Force units in Europe during the Kosovo campaign, recalled that allied "air power was getting its paper graded on the number of tanks killed"--even though taking out armored vehicles one by one was never going to halt "ethnic cleansing."

So NATO began to hit high-profile institutional targets in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, instead of forces in the field. Although they were legitimate military targets, General Jumper said, destroying them also had the effect of undermining popular support for the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic.

"It was when we went in and began to disturb important and symbolic sites in Belgrade, and began to bring to a halt the middle-class life in Belgrade, that Milosevic's own people began to turn on him," General Jumper said.

A military official is explaining that attacking certain civilian infrastructure can help to achieve a desired political outcome. That would seem to meet the conventional definition of terrorism, as violence directed against civilians for political ends.  It's not that is new information--NATO airstrikes in Belgrade were intended to harm civilians, and pundits cheered as this happened. But if the point is that the war in Libya is going to be more like Kosovo, this is disturbing.

there are persistent voices--in Congress and even inside the administration--arguing that Mr. Obama is moving too slowly.

Reporters David Sanger and Thom Shanker contend that there is too much concern about perceptions, and that the White House is too squeamish because of Iraq. And who are those persistent voices?

The most vocal camp, led by senators John McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee for president, and Joseph I. Lieberman, the Connecticut independent and another hawk on Libyan intervention, say the central justification for establishing a no-fly zone over Libya is that the rebel leaders themselves are seeking military assistance to end decades of dictatorship.

As always, when it comes to calling for military force, John McCain is front and center in the  TV news debate, since he is apparently an "expert."

But the Times notes that there are others calling for a more aggressive response--including Sen. John Kerry. And that's a problem for the White House:

For the administration, Mr. Kerry's view is more troublesome, given that he is a normally a strong ally on foreign policy issues. He was a fierce critic of the war in Iraq, but he sees Libya as a different matter.

John Kerry was such a fierce critic of the Iraq War that he voted for it.

There was no way to avoid discussion of the fundamental differences of economic strategy.... Major disputes broke out between Washington and China, Britain, Germany and Brazil.

Each rejected core elements of Mr. Obama's strategy of stimulating growth before focusing on deficit reduction. Several major nations continued to accuse the Federal Reserve of deliberately devaluing the dollar last week in an effort to put the costs of America's competitive troubles on trading partners, rather than taking politically tough measures to rein in spending at home.

You see the influence of Hoovernomics on the story, as "tough measures to rein in spending at home" are taken for granted as an answer to "America's competitive troubles"--rather than a sure way to exacerbate those troubles, as countries like Ireland, Spain and Greece are demonstrating anew (Guardian, 11/12/10).

After quoting German Chancellor Angela Merkel lecturing Obama ("I am not one, and Germany is not one, who says growth and fiscal consolidation are contradictory"), the story throws in an observation that has the effect of validating the conservative politician's pro-austerity rhetoric: "Mrs. Merkel is credited with avoiding spending heavily on stimulus programs and emerging with the most successful recovery in Europe."

There's a couple things wrong here: It's true that Merkel is credited with avoided stimulus, but in reality Germany had Europe's biggest stimulus program--82 billion euros, or $110 billion.  (Germany's economy is roughly one-fourth the size of the U.S.'s.)

Secondly, the phrase "most successful recovery in Europe" conceals the fact that Germany's recovery, so far, has been less successful than the United States', at least in terms of GDP growth--from the latest figures available, the U.S. is at 99.4 percent of its pre-recession GDP, while Germany is at 97.3 percent. Pointing this out, though, might have put a wet blanket on what the Times obviously felt was a stirring call for responsible fiscal policy.

The article reported that the range of the missile is "believed to be more than 1,200 miles." Which led me to wonder: Which "parts of Western Europe" are within 1,200 miles of Iran? Well, the city in Iran closest to Western Europe is Tabriz, and looking at this distance calculator shows that Tabriz is less than 1,200 miles from...eastern Crete.

Now, Tabriz is not right at the border of Iran, so you could probably launch a missile with a range of 1,200 miles from some part of Iranian soil and have it land in, say, Athens. You certainly couldn't reach Italy, let alone any of the other countries that probably leap to mind when you think of "Western Europe." So why didn't the Times say "Israel and Greece" when describing the missile's potential range? Would that be too, I don't know, unalarming?