[216] US officials would later acknowledge that there was no evidence the plant was acknowledging manufacturing or storing nerve gas.[217] The attack provoked criticism of Clinton from journalists and academics including Christopher Hitchens,[218] Seymour Hersh,[219] Max Taylor,[220] and others.[221]

Kosovo
Clinton during a briefing on Kosovo, March 31, 1999.
In the midst of a brutal crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists in the province of Kosovo by the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Clinton authorized the use of U.S. Armed Forces in a NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999, named Operation Allied Force.[222] The stated reasoning behind the intervention was to stop the ethnic cleansing (and what the Clinton administration labeled genocide)[223][224] of Albanians by Yugoslav anti-guerilla military units. General Wesley Clark was Supreme Allied Commander of NATO and oversaw the mission. With United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244, the bombing campaign ended on June 10, 1999. The resolution placed Kosovo under UN administration and authorized a peacekeeping force to be deployed to the region.[225] NATO announced its soldiers all survived combat,[226] though two died in an Apache helicopter crash.