The Terrorism Connection

During the Cold War, the United States and its allies assessed every local conflict for its quotient of strategic harm or benefit. With the Cold War ended, the allies believe that they may allow local conflict to remain local with relative impunity.

The war in the Balkans has been a semi-exception to this rule. The European powers have not felt that they could safely ignore the carnage there completely, but they have also not felt that any enemy could exploit this war to their serious harm. Serb expansionism under Slobodan Milosevic was, at worst, an ominous precedent.

But this calculus may be due for a revision. Though the Bosnian government has accepted a European proposal for a Bosnian partition, the separatist Bosnian Serbs have not. The war seems all but certain to continue, and the U.N. forces may soon be weakened by the reduction or even elimination of French and British support. If that happens, the conflict may continue as a Christian-Muslim conflict with outside support from the more ardent wing of each side’s co-religionists. To oversimplify, Serbs-against-Bosnian-Muslims could become Cossacks-against-Mujahedeen.

At that point, this local conflict would begin to become a grim imitation of the Cold War proxy conflicts of old. This time it would be the shadow of terrorism, rather than the shadow of nuclear conflict, that would lengthen. The Muslim minorities in several European countries are increasingly aggrieved and militant. The heavy loss of Muslim life that would result in the short term from a U.N. default in Bosnia could exacerbate their sense of grievance and foster the related militancy.

The rhetoric heard at the sentencing of the World Trade Center terrorist bombers should remind us that the United States is not immune. That crime was utterly savage, and the life sentences that have now been imposed are fully justified. But a great deal can be lost in cross-cultural translation, especially in a climate of rising hostility. That climate will only worsen if the situation in Bosnia worsens.

“We’re fighting them there so that we won’t have to fight them here,” American soldiers said in Korea and Vietnam. In this instance, ironically, it is refusing to defend Muslims there that may lead in time to defending against other Muslims here.