Is it finally time to implement a no-fly zone in Syria? http://slate.me/R0kxkR
Slate 
3:03 AM - 9 Oct 12 · Details
Syrian rebels help a wounded comrade who survived a Syrian army strike outside a hospital in the northern city of Aleppo on September 18. NATO was nowhere to be seen.
Photo by Marco Longari/AFP/GettyImages
Eleven months of civil war.
That’s a debatable judgment, depending on where, exactly, one draws the line between the regime’s brutal repression of Syrian pro-democracy protesters and the bloodthirsty onslaught against civilians that followed.
But it struck me recently that it was at about this point in 1992 that NATO finally established a no-fly zone over Bosnia-Hercegovina, about 11 months after the event now recognized as the start of that war, a mortar attack on Sarajevo that killed 16 shoppers in a Muslim neighborhood.
Remember, after 11 months of ethnic cleansing – not a bad term for what the Assad regime is currently attempting on the unmeltable ethnic pot that is Syria – Bosnia’s darkest days were most definitely ahead.
Concentration camps, like the one exposed by The Guardian’s Ed Vulliamy at Omarska, were already known to exist.
But the massacres at Srebrenica, the destruction of the ancient bridge of Mostar, the killing thousands in the siege of Sarajevo by snipers and artillery barrage, and the score settling murders and rapes and other atrocities committed by all three sides all over the land continued for three more years before the dictators bluff was finally called.
Why should we care about Syria? Well, that’s a post for a less intelligent audience, I hope. And while I frequently make the case that the U.S. should be scaling back its military commitments around the globe, there is penny wise and there’s pound-foolish. The time to impose a no-fly zone is now.
Remember, the question is Syria is not a purely military one, it's about momentum. If the outside world remains outside, Assad's well-armed regime, fearing reprisals, has a good chance of wearing down resistance and restoring its reign of terror. But dictators, at least in recent history, don't survive no-fly zones -- whether or not they ever truly tip the battlefield balance.
The alternative is grim. Allowing Syria’s chaos to continue will damage too many strategic American interests and, perhaps more importantly, squander an opportunity to affect precisely the kind of change that will make the world a safer place as America’s ability to “police it” inevitably fades.
Ironically, my post of two days ago – in effect, an argument to deputize Turkey as the leader of a more forceful intervention in Syria (and the Mideast generally) – was outdated within a day. Turkey doesn’t need Washington’s blessing: it got Assad’s instead, via an artillery attack that killed several Turkish civilians.
