What Can the Balkans Teach Us About Intervening in Syria?

I Led the NATO Campaign in the Kosovo War. We Learned Some Valuable Lessons From It.

Once again, the United States appears poised to strike with its military forces in the Mideast, this time to sanction 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’s not exactly right: A better precedent is President Bill 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 then-former President George H. W. Bush.

The missiles struck, without any …