The Clinton role in the rise of Islamic irredentism has now come full circle. Bill Clinton might get the credit for the original Muslim tilt. Bosnia (1992-95) set the table for a series of interventions that gave birth to the so-called Arab Spring and any subsequent triumphs of Islamofascism. Ironically, Bill Clinton could be both righteous about civil wars in the Balkans and oblivious to genocide in Rwanda simultaneously.
Muslim lives matter, Black Africans, not so much.
In the past decade, with an assist from an uncritical media, a “long war” chimera has emerged to rationalize indecision and serial failure abroad. After being told that al Qaeda was on the run and the Islamic State was the “junior varsity,” Americans are now told that Muslim wars are so “complicated” that solutions to religious fascism and terror must be deferred to the indefinite future. The “long war” scenarios now being spun by the Pentagon and the Obama/Clinton camp are excuses for inaction, the political equivalent of kick-the-can.
Such apologetics, if not appeasement, is nothing new. America has been risk averse since World War II. Ironically, while eschewing formal war declarations, the cloak and dagger faction of national security community is still populated by the same Cold War cowboys that flourished during the containment years. Anti-Communist rationale has now morphed into a pernicious, if not indiscriminate democratic imperialism, a series of hair-brained regime change operations with no regard for consequence — or the day after.
The instability and chaos that plague the 21st Century are created problems. Policies such as regime change, counter insurgency, nation building, and “humanitarian” intervention are probative. Withal, the US State Department, and the various US national security apparati, has facilitated the spread of terror, the immigrant tsunami, the rise of the Islamic State, the resurgence of jihad (nee Crusades), and the spread of Islamism worldwide.
When Donald Trump claims that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton created ISIS, his rhetoric might be figurative, but the underlying truth is literal. The political vacuums created by toppling secular authoritarian Muslim states have been filled by our worst political nightmare, religious fascism.
Bosnia, like much of the Balkans, is just one of the sectarian fault lines of civilization. Indeed, it was Muslim unrest that precipitated Serb pushback, civil war, and the eventual collapse of Yugoslavia. The so-called “ethnic” cleansing that followed had more to do with religion than race. Bosnians are, for the most part, Muslims with a bloody fascist pedigree.