Lessons from the Balkans and formulating a policy toward Syria

 Pres. Obama appears to be contemplating some sort of military intervention in Syria   in response to reports of a large chemical  weapons attack on civilians and increasing bi partisan pressure to take act. Whatever military action is taken, it should be effective enough to force the parties to the negotiating table instead of just a hand slap or a penalty for bad behavior. However, invasion and occupation should not be the objective, either.

As the time of writing,  Pres. Obama  is waiting for a UN report on whether  the Assad regime, or the rebels were the perpetrators and he wants to  assemble   an international  coalition, preferably with a UN resolution. . However, Pres. Obama is correct in making certain it was  the Assad regime  that used chemical warfare against civilians. That is a hard  lesson we learned from our blunder into the Iraq war.

We should  have learned much more from our excursions into conflicts  in the past twelve years.     From Afghanistan and Iraq we learned boots on the ground, occupation  and nation building cost us too much in blood and treasure and worked not so well. 

The President is also  seeking the cover of international law that defines the limits of our  goals and creates widespread international approval. It is counterproductive to advancing our national foreign policy and  interests  if we appear as the world bully and sometimes an ineffective one, at that. There is  help with military might, and a greater sense of world outrage at the kind of tactics the Assad regime appears to have employed if we get a large body of other nations to join us.

The Syrian civil war most  resembles the Balkan wars of the 1990’s which also involved a civil war between and among groups affiliated by religion.  Hatred erases many constraints on civilized  human behavior   We were able to level the playing field sufficiently  in Bosnia  by instituting no fly zones, strategic supplying of weapons to the extent  the warring parties saw further killing and battle as futile. The Dayton Accord ended the Bosnian conflict,   the bloodiest  war in Europe since  World War II.   NATO air strikes during the  Kosovo conflict  later caused regime change in Belgrade .  The cost of our own blood and treasure was quite small.

While Syria is indeed a larger scale of a  religious  driven version of the Bosnian conflict, it also has some differences:  The Assad regime has an effective air force making a casualty free enforcement of no fly zones less likely.  Missile strikes carefully targeted to avoid civilian casualties may be a better option.   Neighbors such as the Saudis and Iran  are already involved , which could expand the conflict to a general middle east conflagration.  Al Qaeda- like combatants have infiltrated the Sunni opposition and arms supplies will certainly fall into our enemies’ hands.

Knowing this, then why should we risk intervention in Syria? The reasons are pragmatic and moral.  We can always expect combatants to be casualties, but the nature of war changed in the 20^th century.  War was no longer limited to trenches and marching armies; killing and terrorizing civilians became the dominant tactic and technology provided the means to do it on a massive scale.

 The massacres of Srebrenica  in the Serbian drive to ethnically cleanse Bosnia rightly motivated much of  the rest of the world to intervene. We could not tolerate another holocaust in Europe.

 The use of  chemicals or any of the  other many tools in the civilian mass  killing toolbox need international controls that rise above just verbal condemnation, inspectors, economic sanctions, or back door arms supplying.   The    destruction of civilian life as a tactic must be stopped  unless  others in the future believe they, too, can use such  inhumane practices  without severe repercussions.