In a New York Times op-ed today, former NATO Europe commander General Wesley Clark joins his ex-boss Bill Clinton in pressuring Barack Obama to escalate our military involvement in Syria. Clark makes a reasonable case, acknowledging the risks involved but arguing that a demonstrated U.S. willingness to deepen its involvement would increase the chances for a diplomatic solution to the Syrian civil war. He points to the widely acclaimed NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999, which eventually rid the Balkans of the execrable dictator Slobodan Milocevic, as a partial model for action in Syria. I don’t agree with Clark, but my intention here is not to argue with him about Syria. What I find most objectionable about Clark’s piece is his misleading discussion of our Kosovo experience.
Given his role at the time, it is unsurprising that Clark would echo the conventional view that NATO’s relentless bombardment of Syria beginning in March 1999 was a resounding success. It is disappointing, however, to see him re-writing history in support of that view. In the space of two short paragraphs near the end of his column, Clark tells one lie, makes one significant omission and one disingenuous understatement
The lie is “...a limited NATO air campaign began after diplomatic talks failed to halt Serbian ethnic cleansing.” It was commonplace at the time for interventionists to point to Serb ethnic cleansing as retrospective justification for NATO’s “limited air campaign.” (It’s not clear what Clark means by “limited”--the bombing was extensive and caused thousands of casualties.) What they usually failed to note was that the heavy Serb drive to ethnically cleanse Kosovo occurred after NATO’s bombing commenced. Clark gets around this by simply saying falsely that the ethnic cleansing was under way during the diplomatic talks that broke down prior to the bombing.
Clark omits mention of the failure of judgment that underlay NATO’s decision to bomb: everyone thought that Milosevic would quickly fold once the bombing started. Instead, Milosevic held out for 72 days, using the bombing as an excuse and cover for his brutal ethnic cleansing. Clark seems to cite the length of the bombing campaign as indicative of Western resolve, but the horrors of those 72 days could just as well be cited as evidence of the inevitability of unintended and unpredictable consequences of military action.
Clark’s understatement is his observation that “...some [of the Kosovars] were said to be terrorists.” Were said to be? The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) freely practiced terrorism; they inflicted more deaths before the bombing campaign than the Serbian authorities did. An informal ally of the NATO forces, the vengeance-seeking KLA was responsible for numerous atrocities once the NATO victory was secure.
So, Kosovo may well provide lessons relevant to the current mess in Syria, but Clark’s column doesn’t quite capture them all.