Wesley Clark: Syria vs. Kosovo
Kosovo battle larger, different strategic situation, but still teaches to expect unexpected.
Once again, the United States appears poised to strike with its military forces in the Middle East, this time to punish Syria's regime for deploying chemical weapons against its own citizens. Some have cited NATO's 1999 Kosovo campaign that I directed against Serbian forces as a precedent. That effort was a successful one that saved lives. But how comparable is it to possible strikes against Syria's regime?
First, Kosovo was a much larger effort. In terms of scope, a more analogous precedent to a strike on Syria would be President Clinton's strike against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's intelligence center in Baghdad with cruise missiles in 1993, in punishment for Saddam's alleged plot to assassinate former president George H. W. Bush.
Second, in the 1990s, the U.S. had more leverage on the global stage than it does today. Russia was struggling to regain its footing after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and China was less than 20 years into its remarkable economic rise. The U.S. was the world's sole indisputable superpower.
But the Kosovo campaign can still be instructive in other respects because it offers lessons on expecting the unexpected and on improvising in the midst of a confrontation.
As in the case of Syria today, there was no United Nations resolution explicitly authorizing NATO to bomb Serbia. But NATO nations found other ways, including an earlier U.N. Security Council Resolutionpage 105, to legally justify what had to be done. In Syria, the violation of the 1925 Geneva prohibition against the use of chemical weapons is probably sufficient justification. (The fact that Russia used chemical weapons in Afghanistan in the 1980s should be used to undercut Russian objections to strikes against Syria today.)
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/08/29/syria-wesley-clark-kosovo-nato/2726733/
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