But where can Obama turn for the legitimacy of a multinational
alliance? Nobody has yet said, but a possible answer is, once again,
NATO—this time led perhaps by Turkey, the alliance’s easternmost member,
whose leaders are very concerned by the growing death toll and
instability in Syria just across their southern border.
The weapons that NATO used—and, more important, did not use—in Kosovo
are also likely to appeal to President Obama. Clinton was insistent
that no U.S. ground troops be sent to aid the Albanians and told his
commanders to keep from losing a single American in the fight, if
possible.
And so, the Kosovo campaign was, from America’s vantage, strictly an
air war. (Just two U.S. servicemen were killed, and not in battle but in
an Apache helicopter that crashed during an exercise.) The air war went
on for what seemed, at the time, an eternity—78 days. More than 1,000
NATO planes (including the first Predator drones) flew a total of 38,000
combat sorties. The bombs—most of them dropped from altitudes of 10,000
feet and higher, to avoid air-defense batteries—seemed to have no
effect on Milosevic’s actions until the final days of the campaign, and
so NATO’s commanders kept adjusting and expanding the target list, which
ranged from military bases, factories, and electrical power plants to
individual Serbian tanks on the battlefield.
Bad intelligence led to a few horrific mistakes: the bombing of an
Albanian caravan, which was confused with a Serbian convoy, and the
Chinese embassy in Belgrade, which was thought to be a military relay
station. In all, “collateral damage” over the 78 days killed an
estimated 1,200 civilians
In the end, though, the war was won. The strategic goals were to stop
the fighting, force Milosevic to pull back his army, restore Kosovo as
an autonomous Albanian enclave, and insert NATO troops—30,000 of them—as
peacekeepers. All the goals were met.end quote from:
Obama's Guns of August
These moves (or something like this) make the most sense now. Acting along with NATO and stopping more atrocities in Syria likely will end Assad just like it ended
Milosevic 14 years ago now.
Slobodan Milošević - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slobodan_Milošević
Slobodan
Milošević was a Serbian and Yugoslav politician who was the President
of Serbia (originally the Socialist Republic of Serbia) from 1989 to
1997 and ...
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