American foreign policy is now in a new period of containment, similar to that inaugurated forty years ago by George Kennen in his Mr. X article in Foreign Affairs. The problem is that there is no longer a simple bipolar world in which there was only one big threat to contain and for which technology, albeit very expensive, provided a simple answer. Today there are no poles, and the threats range from ethnic conflict, religious extremism, terrorism, and nuclear proliferation to narcotics, economic imbalances, population explosion, and ecological genocide.
The masters of the universe in the White House are expected to solve or contain immediately all the problems of the world. Otherwise they will be accused, in the words of E. J. Dionne, Jr., of having "the guts of Neville Chamberlain and the operational skills of the guys who brought us the Bay of Pigs." Faced with the threat of political losses at home, the politicians have tasked their gurus to save them from the threatening world abroad by coming up with a foreign-policy-equivalent of the unified theory of physics.
The most gallant such effort is Samuel P. Huntington's breathtaking proposal that, during the coming century, civilizations, not states, will be the real actors in international affairs. Since he has not yet escaped the blinders of the Cold War mentality that sees the world as a universe of threats, our future thus becomes "The Clash of Civilizations." The only logical foreign policy thus must aim to contain whatever civilizations or alliance of civilizations might destroy the world as we know it, i.e. might upset the status quo.
The major threat to America's interests, according to many in the intelligence and foreign policy communities, will be the Muslim world. Huntington goes them one further by forecasting an even greater threat, namely, two civilizations, the Sino or Confucian and the Islamic, in alliance against America and the rest of the world. The task thus becomes how to contain this threat.
We may accept the basic thesis that civilizations as the highest form of human self-identity will be increasingly important in the "global village" during the century ahead. But we should shift to the opportunity mentality that can transcend the Cold-War psychosis and make possible a century of peaceful engagement designed to promote the interests of all civilizations, nations, and persons.
Globally, we may now be where we were in 1967 when Zbigniew Brzezinski introduced the new paradigm of "peaceful engagement" to destroy Communism. The difference is that Islam as a civilization does not aim to destroy America, though many Muslims in the world have been radicalized by centuries of felt injustice. We required twenty years from the beginning of "containment," focused on threat, to reach the maturity of Brzezinski's new framework for American foreign policy. Another twenty years, from 1967 to 1987, were required for it to reach fruition.
Although self-fulfilling prophecies have begun to create the very threat in the Muslim world that we are now trying to contain, we should hope that a policy of opportunity-analysis and opportunity-initiatives would bear fruit very soon. The PLO-Israeli Accord can be the first step, but only if it is part of a grand strategy of peaceful engagement not merely with a few unrepresentative and isolated Muslim governments but with the one billion Muslims, a fifth of the world's people, living largely in a 1000-mile-wide swath reaching from the Pacific westward all the way to the Atlantic.
A shift from the threat mentality to an opportunity mentality would call for a process of civilizational dialogue between the "Western" and the Islamic civilizations rooted in an understanding that the basic principles of law in Islam and its basic religious beliefs and practices are very similar if not identical to the basic premises of America's founding fathers, though both Muslims and Americans have lost much of this common heritage.
The alternative is a world of warring economic blocs and the spiritual and moral dissolution of the United States from within. An American foreign policy focus on threat at the expense of opportunity is highly risky also because it would surely produce the one threat we are most urgently trying to prevent, namely radicalized populations and unrepresentative governments with a terrorist mentality leading to eventual wars of mass destruction.
Although the enlightened self-interests of both the Muslim world and America are identical, they each often follow parochial policies designed to play in a zero-sum
game, whereby any gain by one must be a loss to the other. The two major threats to peace in the world are a parochial American strategy to consolidate a new world order based on maintaining the existing status quo, and a parochial Muslim strategy to overthrow the existing world order in order to promote justice. Each party rationalizes its strategy by demonizing the other in a spiraling process of self-fulfilling prophecy.
The only solution is for the United States to recognize that basic change in the world is inevitable, and for the Muslims around the world to recognize that the only way to achieve justice is to work with Americans in addressing the challenges and opportunities common to us all.
The unified field theory of global affairs was well articulated by a leading Washington strategist, namely, the First Lady, Hillary Clinton. In summarizing the purpose of her new role, she said, "I have a burning desire to do what I can, a desire to make the world around me - kind of going out in concentric circles - better for everybody." In an interview in her West Wing office with Martha Sherrill, she called for a "politics of meaning," whereby her own life and our life as a nation can become "integrated," so that our "emotional life and physical life, spiritual life and political life, all fit together in sync, an orchestra sitting down to play the same song." She would "rather convince you of something slowly - by deed - and she would rather change your mind permanently - about the world or people or politics - than make you laugh right here and now." President Clinton has a master strategist in the White House, because the master is always the one who can define the issue. Unfortunately, few politicians can understand what real vision is all about, so grand strategy becomes irrelevant, and all that is left is tactics with nowhere to go.
Since the end of the bipolar world only five years ago with the advent of Boris Yeltsin and the destruction of the Berlin Wall, we have had two paradigmatic revolutions in viewing the dynamics of world affairs.
First we had "the new world order" of Francis Fukuyama, who asserted that Communism had died, liberal democracy had won, and history had ended in a new world order dominated by secular elites governing from the United States.
This ``new world order'' paradigm, based on a Marxist model, turned out to be wishful thinking and even irrelevant, though it remains as an imperial alternative for
frustrated politicians. For a couple of years, policymakers, and especially the policy
advisers who inhabit Washington's think-tanks, were lost in what clearly was a new world with no familiar landmarks. They were buffeted by micro-cosmic events unfolding in Bosnia, Somalia, Kashmir, Tadjikistan, and countless other places, but could not produce a coherent set of guidelines to determine how the United States should react to each individual event, if at all. Therefore they felt obliged to come up with some macrocosmic paradigm of thought that could help them make sense of what otherwise seemed to be an unfolding, universal chaos without pattern, purpose, or any handles for external control.
To their rescue came Samuel P. Huntington, Director of a major global think-tank, the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. Huntington had staked out a claim to intellectual leadership a generation earlier when he led the assault on the Western paradigm of "nation-building," whereby progress in the Third World depended on the abolition of indigenous cultures and their substitution by the secular civilization of the West, which was to "mobilize" the natives into clones of their new secular mentors or would-be mentors in the United States. Huntington helped win the battle during the Vietnam era of the l960's against the utopian optimists who had hoped and worked for U.S. unilateral dominance in the world.
In 1993, Huntington decided to fill the paradigmatic vacuum in Washington by updating his ideas to guide U.S. policymakers in the century ahead. He did so by publishing a magisterial article in the Summer, 1993, issue of Foreign Affairs entitled, "The Clash of Civilizations."
He theorized that after the end of the post-bipolar world, which was dominated by two super-states, there would be no dominant states. In fact, international affairs would not be dominated by states at all, because the role of the state as the ultimate or real actor in international affairs would be replaced by civilizations. He identified eight civilizations: Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly African.
His presentation of the new paradigm was so breathtaking and seductive that it may occupy center stage in one form or another in policy discussions for many years to come. Although most younger scholars and non-academics acted as if Huntington had invented the first wheel, in fact, Huntington was merely reviving an old policy dispute that dates back to the time of Ibn Khaldun in Tunisia six centuries ago. Ibn Khaldun wrote many volumes to support his thesis that ideas control history and the ultimate force in man's individual or collective life is religious, i.e., the search for ultimate meaning in a transcendent purpose.
Oswald Spengler, author of the multi-volume Der Untergang des Abendlandes, at the beginning of this century, forecast that the West would decline as a civilization and die out because it had lost its spiritual dynamo. Half a century ago, Arnold Toynbee gained fame by explaining, also in many volumes, that civilizations are the substance of history and that they rise only when there is a critical challenge and an inspired response. Toynbee called Ibn Khaldun the greatest historian of all time.
World War II gave rise to an intense ideological struggle between the civilizational versus the nationalistic explanation of human action. Toynbee, Quincy Wright, and Parkinson led the field of macrocosmic theoreticians who said that no individual state could act independently of its parent civilization. This, of course, would mean that Stalin and Hitler were natural products of Western civilization. Their opponents, above all Hans Morgenthau and Raymond Aron, took the micro approach and said each state is unique, just like an individual person, is motivated by power not principle, and acts independently in nurturing its own culture for good or bad.
This whole subject of the microcosmic versus the macrocosmic explanation of human group dynamics was hotly debated in academic circles as well as in the intelligence and policymaking communities in Washington during the l960's and l970's. Intelligence managers debated what indicators served best to predict threats and a few policymakers debated what indicators were best to predict opportunities as well as to judge the success or failure of policies addressing either. A whole new discipline of quantitative behavioral science began to form in response to the new requirements, but it served mainly to disinform rather than to enlighten because the most easily observable indicators are by nature superficial.
During the l960's, when behavioral science had been carried to absurd extremes during the Vietnam war, a new guru of the macrocosmic began to influence elite thought in America and to bring a perception of order in the world for confused policy advisers. This was Fernand Braudel, a Marxist-Leninist in liberal clothes, who taught that there are three levels of human action relevant to policymakers. The first, most superficial level, is the world of current events, which one reads about in the daily newspapers. This has little meaning, because it is influenced and even determined by a deeper level of institutional change, which is much less observable and therefore
less amenable to manipulation by policymakers. Underlying this as the agent of change in human affairs is the level of paradigmatic thought. As popularized at the time by Thomas Kuhn, a paradigm is a framework of reference against which all concepts of truth and rightness are measured. Changes at this deepest level take place glacially or else in sudden qualitative leaps, in accordance with modern chaos theory, but can no more be stopped or directed by conscious human action than man can stop or accelerate a glacier itself. This tri-level view of reality was considered by a few policy professionals as the best lens for either the intelligence or the policy communities to use in viewing the world, because it sheds insight on the environment and the limits within which policymakers can effect change. And it also created a policymaking environment conducive to the new science of ``management by objectives,'' wherein the development of vision and grand strategy could find a home.
With this background of cultural development in the art of foreign policy analysis, it was perhaps natural that in 1993 think-tankers in Washington and the academic community would search for meaning in a seemingly crazy world by looking for permanent actors with permanent interests. The only ones that still exist, according to Samuel Huntington, are civilizations, because every civilization by definition constitutes a unique paradigm of thought and action, and each has an organic need to pursue its own interests in survival and prosperity, either by cooperation with other civilizations or through conflict with them. By sublimating the arena from one of micro-nations to that of macro-civilizations, the world could be tidied up at least intellectually, though the potential for serious errors in discernment and policy prescription might be greatly increased.
The first theorists to address this renewed macrocosmic explanation of international affairs saw the entire world as a universe of threats, simply because this was the perspective they inherited from the bipolar era, when nothing made sense outside of the threat posed by Communism to the free-world. The analogy that sprang to mind to explain the threats to America was the geology of tectonic plates, whereby earthquake events and even the growth of mountains are triggered by massive blocks of the earth's crust forced against each other by nuclear or other energies powerful almost beyond human imagination. Each civilization serves as a tectonic plate and all are moving inexorably toward confrontation.
The analogies were striking. Just as the Himalayan mountains have been created by the movement of the Indian plate colliding with the Central Asian plate to the north, so also an equally gigantic confrontation may be shaping up as the unstoppable Hindu civilization grinds inexorably against the immovable Muslim civilization that stretches across all of Asia from central China to the Mediterranean and beyond. Other plates may grind sideways but with perhaps even more dramatic results.
By analogizing from the tectonic plates that drive the surface changes on the planet earth, Huntington concludes that "the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between civilizations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future."
Huntington explains that "a civilization is the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of what distinguishes humans from other species. ... Civilizations may include several nation states ... or only one, as is the case with Japanese civilization, ... and may include sub-civilizations. Western civilization has two major variants, European and North American, and Islam has its Arab, Turkic, and Malay subdivisions. ... Civilizations are dynamic; they rise and fall; they divide and merge. And, as any student of history knows, civilizations disappear and are buried in the sands of time."
He suggests that the clash of civilizations will intensify for a number of reasons during the coming century. First, the interactions among peoples in the "global village" may not bring harmony but rather intensify civilizational consciousness and therefore invigorate differences and animosities that reach back deep into history. In economics, regionalism in the form of trading blocs will reinforce civilizational consciousness, and the process may be reciprocal because economic regionalism may succeed only when it is rooted in a common civilization. "Decreasingly able to mobilize support and form coalitions on the basis of secular ideology, governments and groups will increasingly attempt to mobilize support by appealing to common religion and civilizational identity." Politics, economics, and religion will become tools of each other.
Furthermore, Huntington concludes that the modernization process worldwide is separating people from the nation as a source of identity, and religious fundamentalism is rushing in to fill the gap as part of a return to the roots phenomenon, focused outwardly against the source of the identity problem, the West. And he adds, "Cultural characteristics and differences are less mutable and hence less easily compromised and resolved than political and economic ones. ... In class and ideological conflicts, the key question was, 'Which side are you on?' and people could and did choose sides and change sides. In conflicts between civilizations, the question is 'What are you?'" The answer he fears during the twenty-first century may be really a matter of life and death, for uncounted millions.
The major question in policymaking therefore is which civilization will clash with and perhaps bury another or others. If there is to be a global civilization, which will it be, or will they all destroy each other and give rise to something new. The answers will depend, one would conclude, on which civilization can best recognize the dynamics and orchestrate them to its own advantage.
Having set the intellectual stage for a policy conclusion, Huntington then proceeds to invoke the spectre of an alliance between Islam and its many component nations with the Confucian civilization, which includes China but extends beyond it. He thereby invokes an almost genetic fear of the two forces that invaded Europe, the Ottomans and the Mongols, and the tribal fear of inundation by alien peoples who today each number more than one billion persons, each more than the total population of the West.
In order to build on the originators of the current campaign against Islamic civilization, Huntington quotes the "new Orientalists," starting with the Indian Muslim author, M. J. Akbar, who writes that, after the end of Communism, the West's "next confrontation is definitely going to come from the Muslim world. It is in the sweep of the Islamic nations from the Maghreb to Pakistan that the struggle for a new world order will begin." Huntington reinforces this position with Bernard Lewis's similar conclusion in his Atlantic Monthly article of September, 1990, "The Roots of Muslim Rage," which prepared the way for Desert Storm: "We are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations - the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both."
Huntington warns American policymakers that, "In Eurasia the great historic fault lines between civilizations are once more aflame. This is particularly true along the boundaries of the crescent-shaped Islamic bloc of nations from the bulge of Africa to Central Asia. Violence also occurs between Muslims, on the one hand, and Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans, Jews in Israel, Hindus in India, Buddhists in Burma, and Catholics in the Philippines. Islam has bloody borders."
One would expect that Huntington would ask himself what the significance is of the fact that, even before Bosnia, 80% of the refugees of the world were Muslims. The Islamic world does have bloody borders, but the blood comes at the hand of the Communists in Sinkiang, where genocide has been waged for decades; of the Russian nationalists and their fascist allies in the Central Asian republics, where in 1992 more than 30,000 Muslims in Tadjikistan were exterminated and 150,000 made homeless; and of the so-called secular government of India in Kashmir, where a tragedy equal to that in Bosnia is practically unknown to the world only because India does not permit freedom of information. One would think from Huntington's litany of gore that the Muslims are attacking the Buddhists in Burma, the Hindus in India, the Jews in Israel, and the Serbs in Bosnia, rather than trying to defend themselves against aggression.
Huntington is honest by admitting the inconsistency of the United States when it prevents the Muslims in Bosnia from defending themselves while it refuses to impose sanctions on Israel for its policies in the occupied territories. He explains this simply by his statement, "A world of clashing civilizations is inevitably a world of double standards: people apply one standard to their kin-countries and a different standard to others."
He states, obviously with approval, "Global political and security issues are effectively settled by a directorate of the United States, Britain, and France, world economic issues by a directorate of the United States, Germany, and Japan, all of which maintain extraordinarily close relations with each other to the exclusion of lesser and largely non-Western countries. Decisions made at the U.N. Security Council or in the International Monetary Fund that reflect the interests of the West are presented to the world as reflecting the desires of the world community. The very phrase 'the world community' has become the euphemistic collective noun (replacing 'the Free World') to give global legitimacy to actions reflecting the interests of the United States and other Western powers."
Perhaps the most egregious case of duplicity was the intervention by the United States in Somalia when the Muslim forces were beginning to consolidate their control and had already brought sufficient order so that crops could be planted and the famine stopped. One influential analysis justifying the intervention was published in The Washington Post of October 17, 1993, by Christopher Whalen, who writes that American intervention was designed "to protect the increasingly isolated Saudi Arabian monarchy from the combined threat of Iranian military and political power and Islamic fundamentalism. [In contrast to earlier cases] this time 'humanitarian assistance' became the sole label for the latest intervention. ... Iran's limited but growing role in East African states like the Sudan and Somalia is part of a much larger strategy to gradually encircle the prime target in the region - Saudi Arabia - with a web of regional alliances and covert military operations. Strategically, as Yossef Bodansky wrote recently in Global Affairs, 'all of this effort was aimed at a Sudanese-Iranian presence in the Horn of Africa [aiming] toward a transformation of the Red Sea into a Green [Muslim] Lake.' ... America is in the position of defending a weakling regime (Saudi Arabia) that cannot survive in its own increasingly dangerous neighborhood. It has been said that an American military withdrawal from Somalia ... would have serious consequences for the Persian Gulf. The Saudis and other fearful Arab states would believe that Washington can no longer be trusted to serve as a regional watchdog." This analysis is grossly simplistic, yet accurate to the extent that it suggests a hidden agenda, as do most acts of governments around the world. The real policy issue was not the need for humanitarian aid, or even the wisdom of using military force to impose political solutions from the top down as part of a worldwide experiment in social engineering, but whether this was the right place to begin an attack on Islam as a growing global force.
The policies of intervention in Somalia and non-intervention in Bosnia, however, according to Huntington, are peripheral to the main arena of combat. The real center of the threat in the old Mackinder sense of continental control is Central Asia. Against the world community a new threat is now emerging, which Huntington calls the "Confucian-Islamic connection." He devotes a major section of his 27-page position paper on the clash of civilizations to this central area of global conflict.
"Those countries," he writes, "that for reason of culture and power do not wish to, or cannot, join the West, compete with the West by developing their own economic, military, and political power. They do this by promoting their internal development and by cooperating with other non-Western countries. The most prominent form of this cooperation is the Confucian-Islamic connection that has emerged to challenge the Western interests, values, and power."
He notes the emergence of what Charles Krauthammer calls the "Weapon States," which are those in the Sino-Islamic axis that no longer accept the old world order dominated by Euro-America. He notes that this has forced "the redefinition of arms control, which is a Western concept and a Western goal. During the Cold War, the primary purpose of arms control was to establish a stable military balance between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies. In the post-Cold-War world the primary objective of arms control is to prevent the development by non-Western societies of military capabilities that could threaten Western interests."
In conclusion, Huntington forecasts that during the coming century "violent conflicts between groups in different civilizations are the most likely and the most dangerous source of escalation that could lead to global wars; the paramount axis of world politics will be the relations between 'the West and the Rest'; the elites in some torn non-Western countries will try to make their countries part of the West, but in most cases face major obstacles to accomplishing this; a central focus of conflict for the immediate future will be between the West and several Islamic-Confucian states."
This concept of a civilizational alliance against America stretching from the Pacific westward across Asia clear around the world to the Atlantic is appealing, because it suggests that Europe and America are surrounded, just as the Soviet Communists maintained a psychological war-footing by envisaging themselves as surrounded by capitalism. Mao Tse Tung must be moaning in his grave because he never thought of this stroke of brilliance. Mao reversed the Soviet concept of encirclement by claiming that his revolutionary movement would surround the capitalist citadel of Euro-America just as he had surrounded the cities of China from the countryside in his victorious sweep to power in the population center of the world. Perhaps this vision of encirclement may give coherence to American foreign policy, but it fails to recognize the real civilizational dynamics in human history, which are religious. When civilizations become secular, they always lose.
The next issue of Foreign Affairs devoted even more space to countering the Huntington thesis than it allowed to the thesis itself, and the following issue gave Huntington the opportunity to rebut the worst that could be marshaled against him. Unfortunately, the most serious error in Huntington's thesis is shared by all his detractors. They all accept the basic premise that Western civilization is secular.
If we are indeed a secular civilization as most of our opinion elites would have us believe, then America is destined to wage mortal combat forever with every other civilization in the world, simply because all civilizations are based on religion, that is, on a sense of the transcendent and of a higher reality and purpose than man can physically observe or control. Since both the proponents and opponents of the Huntington thesis in the Foreign Affairs dialogue are secularists, they may never be able to see their own fundamental error until the growing traditionalist movement of Christians, Muslims, and Jews inside America renders them irrelevant.
The second basic fallacy behind Huntington's increasingly popular demonization of Islam and Muslims is its origin and basis in the threat mentality that always engulfs a society when it is disintegrating from within. The threat mentality causes otherwise normal people to view the whole world in paranoid terms as a universe of threats. Threat analysis in much of the world is still the paradigm of foreign policy, especially among the military who exist in order to counter threats. And the measures to which the defenders against real or imagined threats are willing to resort can include mass genocide far beyond the capability of any run-of-the-mill terrorists who simply blow up an airplane or a single building. They both can be dangerously psychotic.
The threat mentality often justifies its extremism by defining the threat as whatever the other guy does, without regard for his reaction to or perception of one's own actions, and by defining the other guy collectively as an entire people, or an entire religion, and even as an entire civilization. The result may be a catastrophist view of the world in which one's own ethnic group, or religion, or civilization is locked in mortal combat with "the other."
An extreme example is Imam Khomeini's characterization of America as the "great Satan." This psychotic approach to problems makes rational analysis of dialogue and cooperation impossible and can lead eventually to state support of terrorism and to the use of nuclear weapons in a preemptive strike. Khomeini, as well as millions of his people, were desperately frustrated by what they felt was their oppression by a foreign secular culture bent on its own aggrandizement at their expense. Once the Shah as a proxy of this foreign threat was removed, Khomeini focused on the source of this threat, which for him became an amorphous but monolithic "America." The aggressive war by Iraq aided and financed by the United States and its allies against Iran served only to further radicalize an entire nation and to justify in the minds of its radical leaders the resort to state terrorism against whatever proxy they could find and rather easily attack, especially Israel. By applying this self-fulfilling prophecy of threat in American foreign policy, U.S. strategists produced a threat that may take years to dissipate.
An even more extreme example of psychosis has been the demonization of Islam in Bosnia. The Director of the Republican Task Force on Terrorism, Yossef Bodansky, produced an ostensibly well-researched position paper in September 1992 warning that the Muslims of Bosnia are a spring-board for political radicals to attack Europe and America. Fortunately, in response to immediate protests by the American Muslim Council, the co-chairman and half of the members of this task-force resigned after they read the report that had been issued under their names.
Much more dangerous than such egregious nonsense, which can sell only to Bodansky's fellow paranoids, is the uneasiness of opinion elites at the highest levels in America and Europe over the rise of Islam as an influential religion in the post-bipolar world.
The arguments against permitting the Bosnians to defend themselves against aggression are based clearly on religious prejudice and fear. Thus Henry Kissinger stated on May 16, 1993, in a lengthy position paper, published as an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, "The most irresponsible mistake of the current Bosnian tragedy was the international recognition of a Bosnian state governed by Muslims."
This was repeated more clearly in mid-August by the British foreign minister, Douglas Hurd, who announced that Europe will never permit a country with a Muslim majority and an Islamic government in Europe. One might almost conclude that Kissinger announced the end of a multi-ethnic Bosnia on May 16th by calling for its division and the creation of a small rump Bosnia, whereas Hurd called for the elimination of even this small remnant.
A survivor of the holocaust, Henry Siegman, who is executive director of the American Jewish Congress, stated in the Washington Post of August 24, 1993, "Perhaps the real shameful truth is that the West is indifferent to the fate of Bosnia's Muslims, at least in part, for the same reason it was indifferent to the fate of the Jews in the 1930's. There was something in Hitler's hatred of the Jews that resonated in residual anti-Semitism in Western culture. Similarly, there is something in the Serbian and Croatian demonization of Bosnia's Muslims - the fear of `a Muslim state in the heart of Europe' - that finds an echo in lingering Western prejudice."
"However we rationalize our indifference to what is happening in the Balkans," he continues, "its consequences will surely haunt us in the days and years to come. For what is at stake in Bosnia is not only indescribable human suffering but the idea of the universality of the civilized norms that are the foundation of our freedom and democracy. In Bosnia, on the threshold of an unfolding new order, we have been offered the opportunity to reaffirm that fundamental truth, and we have failed the test."
President Clinton saw clearly what was happening in Bosnia. He urged in a press conference on May 11th, 1993, that we must "stop this ethnic cleansing, murdering people, raping children, and doing terrible acts of violence solely because of people's religion." The juggernaut of Western "multilateralism," however, simply overrode President Clinton's compassion and horror at our inaction, because this particular religion had been declared out of bounds.
The irony of this demonization in Bosnia is that, at least until recently before the process of self-fulfilling prophecy began to take effect, the victims of the Serbian ex-Communists' religio-nationalist xenophobia and genocide have been struggling to uphold all the principles that the Americans and British hold so dear.
They are trying to uphold their belief that communities should function not to exclude or hurt each other but so people can get to know each other, as it is urged in the Qur'an, so they can cooperate in the pursuit of knowledge, justice, and prosperity.
The majority of the people in Bosnia have been fighting to maintain multi-cultural cooperation, as Muslims have throughout most of their history, and to maintain political diversity based on representative governance, which is an absolute requirement under Islamic law. The Bosnians are not an ethnic group but have always been a community of people, including Christians and Jews, who submit to the universal teachings of divine revelation. This is precisely the broadest meaning of the adjective, "Muslim."
It is appropriate that all the Bosnians who are fighting for the very principles on which America was founded are called Muslims. There is no other official designation. People are either Serbs, Croats, or a mixture of ethnic and religious groups officially termed Muslims. The designation is very apt, but the true significance of the term cannot be seen since the entire people have been demonized in the name of a religion.
It is perhaps fortuitous, or the Muslims would say the design of Allah ( ), that the most truly practicing Muslim leader of any country in the entire world is the Bosnian president, Alija Izetbegovich. His book, written in a Communist prison, Islam Between East and West, established Izetbegovich as one of the half-dozen leading Muslim intellectuals in the world.
His only problem is that most of the Muslims of the world have lost touch with their spiritual and intellectual heritage and can no longer fully grasp what Izetbegovich is saying. He is calling for a society governed by leaders who are governed by God, which is the whole idea of the Great American Experiment, rather than, as in most other Muslim countries, by theocrats, military bureaucrats, secular tyrants, or a feudal aristocracy. He is calling for a society governed not by human whim or populist movements but by the rule of law, by the inalienable human rights given every person and community by God, the most important of which are enshrined in the Islamic shari'ah and in the U.S. constitution.
Therefore it was most ironic when Henry Kissinger stated in January, 1993, that he had read Isetbegovich's book and concluded that it represents the purest form of the mounting Islamic threat to "Western civilization."
Since Izetbegovich and all the other great scholars and leaders throughout Islamic history have been calling for exactly what America's founding fathers did when they launched their revolution against foreign oppression, one can only conclude that the zealots behind the movement toward civilizational confrontation either are criminally ignorant or have declared war on the American people.