Retired Gen. Wesley Clark Talks About Precedents And Syria, NPR

[elleng]

Last edited Tue Aug 27, 2013, 09:09 PM - Edit history (1)

Retired Gen. Wesley Clark, who was the NATO commander during the 1999 Operation Allied Force in Kosovo, tells All Things Considered that the situation the United Staes is facing in Syria is best compared to the U.S. bombing of Iraq in 1993.

Clark told NPR's Melissa Block that the only similarity between what's going on in Syria, today, and what happened during the Allied intervention in Kosovo, is Russia's unwillingness to support a United Nations resolution supporting a strike.

"[The Kosovo] campaign, first of all, it wasn't just the bombing that drove the Serbs out. It was the fact that they were engaged with NATO that the Serbs knew that if they didn't accede to pull their forces out and let the Albanians return home that NATO had the capability and was starting to do the planning to put a ground invasion in," Clark said.

The Obama administration has said that regime change would not be the point of any mission in Syria.

"I want to make clear that the options that we are considering are not about regime change," White House spokesman Jay Carney said during a briefing. "They are about responding to a clear violation of international standard that prohibits the use of chemical weapons."

edit: When you start something like this you have to be prepared for an indeterminate length if you have a political objective," Clark said.

However, if the objective is punishment, it can be over quickly with a few missile strikes.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/08/27/216155784/retired-gen-wesley-clark-talks-about-precedents-and-syria

[truedelphi]

1. If only someone would inform Mr Jay Carney that the

Biggest violator of international standards continues to be the USA.

Six million dead, or wounded, or made homeless in Vietnam, while we waged war against them.

Untold tens of thousands who were victims of the US policies of aiding Death Squads in Central America in the Eighties.

And then Iraq - remember the million or so of those who died of sanctions placed against that nation during the nineties, and then the million civilian deaths due to our destabilizing that nation after the 2003 "Shock and Awe." ??

Plus use of Depleted Uranium, in Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq.

And tens of thousands of those whoa re now pursued by our drones.

Then there is the toll of death on our service people as well: over 50,000 lost in Vietnam, over 6,000 in Iraq, over 6,000 in Afghanistan.

[BootinUp]

2. kick