A couple of days ago I was watching Clinton tell a BBC reporter that his administration stopped Al Qaeda from establishing a base in Bosnia. In the same vein, his UN representative and Secretary of State wannabe Richard Holbrooke
wrote that “we would probably have had to pursue Operation Enduring Freedom not only in Afghanistan but also in the deep ravines and dangerous hills of central Bosnia, where a shadowy organization we now know as al Qaeda was putting down roots that were removed by NATO after Dayton.” Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Dayton accords did indeed require the eviction of the “foreign fighters” but Izetbegovic (whose indictment as a war criminal was made public only after his death) ignored that condition with the same impunity Arafat ignored the Oslo agreements demanding the dismantling of Hamas. Consequently, when Bernard-Henri Levy visited Bosnia he found Taliban-run villages and it was from Bosnia that the so called charities financed the Al Qaeda operations.
Srebeniza was an atrocity worth stopping. But so is remembering that Clinton’s way of fighting terror was appeasement and the protection, strengthening and promotion of the “moderate Arab governments” or, more accurately, repressive Sunni autocracies.
It was that policy that the Bush administration discarded after 9/11 to the chagrin of many so-called realists from both parties. Both the insurgency and the inter-Western arguments about the Iraq war (as opposed to the war in Afghanistan) have their roots in that change of strategy. Afghanistan, after all, remains a Sunni country. For the Islamist, of course, both are lost territories.
posted by Judith.
The Dish 