Fouad Ajami just makes things up:

He authorized a NATO air campaign against Serbia that began on March 23, 1999, the very same day a bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress voted to support it [bold mine-DL].

This claim about support from both houses is false. It’s true that the resolution in question breezed through the Senate 58-41, but the House didn’t vote on it until April, and when it came to a vote in the House the resolution failed. There was some Republican support for the resolution in both houses, but the vast majority of Republicans in the House and the Senate opposed the resolution. Because the resolution never passed the House, the Clinton administration never received any form of explicit Congressional authorization for attacking Serbia. Despite the administration’s spin that operations funding counted as “implicit” authorization, Kosovo was an unauthorized and illegal war. Kosovo was one of the more blatant examples of usurpation of war powers by the executive. Pretending it was something else is misleading. If Ajami wants to apply the “Kosovo model” to Syria, he might at least bother to check basic facts about the example he’s using.

Ajami perpetuates some other popular Kosovo myths, including the claim that the air war “crippled Milosevic’s ability to wage war on the Kosovars.” No, it didn’t. The damage to Serb forces in Kosovo was grossly exaggerated at the time. As Micah Zenko reminded us last year:

But a U.S. Air Force review of its precision airpower campaign in Kosovo revealed a much darker picture than NATO’s glowing initial assessment: 14 tanks were destroyed, not 120, as previously reported; similarly, 18 armored personnel carriers, not 220, and 20 mobile artillery pieces, not 450, were eliminated. During the campaign, the Serbian military quickly adapted to NATO’s operations by constructing fake “artillery” from logs and old truck axles, and “surface-to-air missiles” made of paper.

Furthermore, the KLA failed to mount a credible and sustained opposition to the disciplined, ruthless, and better-armed Serbian ground forces. Ultimately, it was NATO’s escalation of air strikes against the Serbian military and the civilian infrastructure in Serbia proper — combined with Russia’s withdrawal of its support for Serbia — that caused Milosevic to capitulate.

Ajami doesn’t seem very familiar with what actually happened in 1999, and he seems even more oblivious to the many reasons why the “Kosovo model” can’t be applied to Syria. Ajami writes:

We could, with some moral clarity, recognize the Syrian National Council as the country’s legitimate government, impose a no-fly zone in the many besieged areas, help train and equip the Free Syrian Army, prompt Turkey to give greater support to defectors from Syrian units, and rally the wealthy Arab states to finance the effort.

I’ve already gone over the many serious problems with arming the opposition, so let’s consider the other points. There was a much more limited goal in 1999: the U.S. and NATO wanted Serb forces to withdraw from Kosovo. The goal of Ajami’s proposal is to “bring down” the Syrian government. Ajami claims that this can be done easily and cheaply. He says that the regime can be felled “without a massive American commitment.” That’s almost certainly not true. A “no-fly zone” as such is fairly pointless, since Assad has not been using aircraft in his crackdown. If Ajami instead means that the U.S. and our allies should wage an air war against the Syrian military, he should say so. Even if that is what he means, Marc Lynch explains why it would be a bad idea:

Air strikes and no-fly zones can not tip the balance in a civil war environment fought in densely populated urban areas where the U.S. lacks reliable human intelligence; recall that an air campaign took six months to succeed in Libya under much more favorable conditions.

Let’s not forget that all of this would drastically increase the death toll in Syria. Supposing that such an attack did somehow succeed and force the regime to collapse, that, too, would be more likely to increase the suffering of the civilian population. The “Kosovo model” is a bad one anyway, but what Ajami proposes for Syria is far worse: an illegal war that would probably make everything worse and would harm the population even if successful.

Update: Andrew Exum lists the weapons and men the Syrian army possesses to underscore how ridiculous the “arm the opposition” argument really is:

According to the 2011 Military Balance, Syria has:

1. 4,950 main battle tanks.
2. 2,450 BMPs.
3. 1,500 more armored personnel carriers.
4. 3,440+ pieces of artillery.
5. 600,000 men under arms in the active and reserve forces.

Now, for the sake of argument, let’s say Syria can only field half of the above equipment and personnel due to maintenance issues and defections or whatever. We’re still talking about a ridiculous amount of advanced weaponry. What arms, then, are we talking about giving these guerrilla groups? Nukes?

Don’t encourage them!