Hegemony

In the aftermath of the Cold War the U.S. has become the world’s lone hegemonic superpower as illustrated in the National Security Strategy document: “The president has no intention of allowing any nation to catch up with the huge lead the U.S. has opened up since the fall of the Soviet Union…” This means that influence of any regional power, or combination of powers, must not outweigh that of the U.S. anywhere on the globe.

The U.S. has exercised its hegemony in Europe through NATO and by virtue of siding with a local party on the ground (local ally or proxy). Opposition primarily from France and Germany ruled out NATO’s military involvement in Iraq. Instead some NATO members formed an ad-hoc coalition of the willing including participation. A pseudo-local proxy was selected: Iraq émigré organizations. In Afghanistan the local proxy was Northern Alliance. NATO came in later as a peacekeeper.

It could be argued that military intervention in Afghanistan to remove Taliban harboring Al Qaeda was justifiable in tangible cost/benefit terms-- protection of the American people from the possibility of another 9/11. A decade prior to 9/11 former Secretary of State James Baker justified the Gulf War by stating: “Jobs, jobs, jobs.” The American economy did benefit via favorable subsequent crude oil prices. Even more importantly, the cost of war was primarily borne out by Saudi Arabia and some Western allies. In contrast, the military interventions in the Balkans and Iraq have the primary cost to the American taxpayers, including the high cost of blowback effects, while tangible benefits continue to be elusive.

With forthcoming requests from the Pentagon, the Pentagon portion of the cost of interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq will approach half a trillion dollars. Linda Bilmes, a former assistant secretary of Commerce, and Josef Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner in economics in 2001, estimated that the final bill for the war in Iraq will be between $1 and $2 trillion depending primarily on how much longer the U.S. troops will stay in Iraq. Relatively speaking the cost of the Balkan interventions is modest, 10-20% of the cost in Iraq. The costs of blowback effects associated with 9/11 in case of the Bosnian jihad, as well as the costs of human sufferings are not accounted for in these figures. These costs are not sustainable. Hence, on one hand one can conclude that the global hegemony pursuits might not have been in the national interest as they are leading the U.S. to ruin in the long run. On the other hand, had the U.S. taken a due diligence approach in selection of local proxies, numerous billions of dollars would have been saved.

In business, due diligence refers to the process of research and analyses that take place in advance of an investment, takeover, or business partnership. In this context, due diligence approach implies a strategy based on analyses of history, cultural diversity and different political and economic developments of the region of interest. In other words, facts should always prevail over fiction. Alternatively, the tool is massive propaganda and deception that indeed had to be used, resulting in both internal and global loss of U.S. credibility. In addition, adherence for the international law should be sine qua non.

Propaganda and Deception

Massive doses of propaganda and deception have been used to dupe the American people in accepting interventions in the Balkans as well as Iraq. In order to make it palatable to the American people, interventions were dressed up as noble pursuits such as liberation, national security considerations, removal of despotic regimes like Saddam Hussein’s, or even myths of humanitarian interventions such as the 1999 one in Kosovo.

Regretfully, we live in times when everything seems to be based on deception, half-truths and distortions as the principal means of justifying actions in violation of international law. The deceptions have not only become more frequent but also more brazen, reflecting the old saying that the masses will more readily fall victim to a big lie than to small one. Endless repetition of a Big Lie becomes the truth. A classic case of Virgil’s complaint about the gossips of Rome applies: Suggestio Falsi; Suppressio Veri (they promote what’s false and suppress what’s true). Orwell said: “In time of universal deceit telling truth is revolutionary act.”

Winning Wars but Losing Peace

As the only global military superpower the U.S. wins wars handily while typically creating misery and chaos for the indigenous people. The Roman historian Tacitus, describing Romans, found appropriate words: Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant (they create a wasteland, and call it peace). The U.S has not mastered governing people thousands of miles away with different cultures and nation building. One of the British Army’s most senior officers to serve in Iraq, Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, accused the U.S. military of cultural insensitivity bordering on “institutional racism.” Rather than losing occupations and for cost-sharing purposes, the U.S. tends to engage the UN (Bosnia, Kosovo), NATO (Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, training in Iraq), or the EU (now in Bosnia and probably soon in Kosovo) to clean up the mess with huge long-term costs and unpredictable consequences. A few observations on Afghanistan and Iraq preceded Bosnia and Kosovo cases.

Atrocities committed by the Northern Alliance factions-- U.S. ally in Afghanistan-- against the Afghan people are comparable to those committed by the Taliban, which were demonized by the media for their brutality. Robert Fisk, writing in the Independent, described the Northern Alliance as a “gang of terrorists, the confederacy of warlords, patriots, rapists and torturers.” They left Kabul in 1996 with 50,000 dead behind them. It should also be noted that the U.S. supported the Taliban prior to 9/11.

On the positive side a constitution is in place and two elections have been held. However, President Karzai is facing terra cognita: drugs, thugs and insurgents. The same warlords, ex-communists, and hard-line Islamists who helped with the destruction of Afghanistan hold half of the seats in parliament. Among them are Mawlawi Mohammed Islam Mohammedi, the former Taliban governor of Bamian, who ordered destruction of the ancient giant Buddhas and Abdurrab Rasul Sayyaf, an Islamist scholar and bin Laden’s supporter. About 100 U.S. soldiers were killed in 2005, twice as many as previous year. About 1,600 people have been killed as insurgent violence has increased. Hence, the war failed to destroy Taliban and Al Qaeda leadership. In addition, a huge drug supply issue emerged overshadowing the issue of terrorism.

The U.S. failed to find a proxy inside Iraq but found proxies in the form of Iraqi émigré organizations led by secular Shiites: Ahmad Chalabi and Iyad Ajawi.  Initially Chalabi was the Pentagon favorite to lead Iraq. He fell out of favor after the so-called “Curveball” scandal and his flirting with Tehran. “Curveball” was an Iraqi defector-informer, the German intelligence did not trust, and whose claim about Saddam’s possession of biological weapons was used by President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell in the prewar presentation to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003. Ajawi became an interim prime minister.

Both Chalabi and Ajawi left Iraq for the West many years ago and were essentially unknown inside Iraq. As a result, in the December elections Chalabi scored less than 0.5% of the vote—not enough to win a seat in the Parliament. After spending millions of dollars Allawi’s Iraqi National List won only 25 seats. In contrast, the religious Shiite-based United Iraqi Alliance has garnered 128 seats. The government is likely to be led by Shiite Muslims with ties to Iran. Thus premature elections resulted in a victory for Islamists and Shiite theocracy. The Islamists win the elections; e.g., elections in Algeria, municipal polls in Saudi Arabia, Hezbollah success in Lebanon, Muslim Brotherhood success in Egypt and the landslide victory of Hamas in Palestine.

Al Qaeda Recruitment in 1990s Made 9/11 Possible

It is pretty much agreed in the available literature that the predominantly U.S./Saudi (with modest British contribution) proxy war against the Soviet Union by the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s gave birth to Al Qaeda, Afghan Arabs and Taliban. Post 9/11, the Bush administration elevated the importance of Al Qaeda to planetary enemy #1.

There has been a prolonged silence as to what happened in between the conclusion of the proxy war in Afghanistan and 9/11. How did Al Qaeda become planetary enemy #1? The 7/7 London bombings broke this silence to a degree. As an example, columnist Charles Krauthammer writing in the Time magazine concluded that the 1990s were the seminal period of Al Qaeda recruitment. The British terrorist experts interviewed by newspapers like the Guardian said that the big surge in growth of extremist groups came not after 9/11 or Iraq but in the mid 1990s—with Bosnia serving as the recruiting sergeant. Brendan O’Neill, writing in the Spectator, said: “In a nutshell, in the 1990s Al Qaeda became the armed wing of Western liberal opinion” and “If right-wing intervention in Afghanistan created the mujahideen, then left-liberal intervention in Bosnia globalised it.” Virtually every major Al Qaeda terrorist action in recent years had links to Bosnia.

Part I provided an overview of the post Cold War U.S. hegemonistic foreign policies suggesting that essential corrections must be made starting with the Balkans by virtue of abandonment of failed Clinton Administration policies. Part II addresses failed Clinton Administration policies in Bosnia which in part led to 9/11. The following topics are addressed: Bosnian Jihad, Bin Laden’s Master Plan, Catastrophic Consequences, Dayton Accords, Clinton Administration Legacy, Bosnia Today, and Islamic Republic Must Be Ruled Out.