NATO air strikes cost two lives and could have prevented genocide if used earlier.
Evidence
For three years the UN struggled to get a basic minimum of food to the enclaves of Srebrenica and 2epa. After some peacekeepers were taken hostage and others threatened with being taken hostage, the people in the safe areas who had been forbidden adequate weapons to defend themselves and had been kept alive by UN humanitarianism were turned over to the Serb army for mass killings. In September 1995, when NATO did use air strikes to break the siege of Sarajevo, total casualties to NATO forces were two French pilots missing. Had those strikes, or a credible threat of strikes, been used to prohibit any genocidal act by any party in 1992, not only would untold numbers of Bosnians (of all religions) have been saved, but the lives of more than two hundred UN peacekeepers as well. — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 340
Categorization
- XREF: Counterfactual cost-benefit analysis that echoes the deterrence arguments in the Milgrom law-merchant material about credible threat preventing defection.