It’s often hard to discern when a tipping point arrives in any international crisis. For those of us working the Balkan beat in the 1990s, it wasn’t until the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica that U.S. and NATO Air Forces finally bombed the Bosnian Serb Army. While Srebrenica was horrifying, it wasn’t as if it came out of nowhere. Prior to 1995, no direct western action was taken despite years of ethnic cleansing, starvation, rape, concentration camps, the brutal destruction of hundreds of Bosniak towns and villages, and the use of heavy weapons against civilians in Sarajevo and elsewhere. Diplomatic efforts to stop the carnage went nowhere and only seemed to empower the guilty parties. Immediately after Srebrenica, however, the U.S.-led bombing campaign changed the dynamic on the ground and quickly led to the Dayton accords and an end of the war.
Are we at such a moment in Syria?
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