The Coming Balkan Caliphate: The Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West (review)

In the aftermath of 9/11, the United States has understandably focused on the radical Islamic terrorist threat emanating from the Middle East and Central and South Asia. However, there have also been recriminations that officials in both the Clinton and Bush administrations failed to recognize the terrorist menace that had been brewing in those regions for many years before that terrible September day. Christopher Deliso, an American journalist based in the Balkans, presents an even more provocative thesis. He argues that the core areas of the Muslim world are not the only sources of a terrorist threat to the West—that radical Islamic elements have gained a significant foothold in the Balkans. Even worse, he contends, the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies aided and abetted that process as Yugoslavia unraveled during the 1990s.

There is little question that Western policy in the region since the end of the Cold War has not been terribly astute. When Yugoslavia began to come apart in the early 1990s, the Western powers rushed to extend diplomatic recognition to the various constituent republics as successor states. Germany in particular adopted a policy of unseemly haste and pushed its associates in the European Community (the institutional predecessor to the European Union) to recognize those secessionist entities without insisting that the new regimes address such troubling issues as territorial boundaries and the rights of ethnic minorities. Although that strategy did not cause too much trouble regarding the independence of Slovenia, a small and ethnically cohesive entity, it helped trigger disastrous violence in both Croatia and Bosnia.

Although the administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton initially sought to pursue a relatively low-profile policy regarding the turbulence in the Balkans and let the European powers take the lead, that attitude began to shift as the civil war in Bosnia intensified. Gradually, Washington took a more activist position and increasingly berated its European allies for not managing the crisis better. Then, in 1995, the United States led a campaign of NATO air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs—an action that directly benefited the Muslim-dominated government in Sarajevo. The Clinton administration followed up that initiative by pressuring all three factions in Bosnia (Muslims, Serbs, and Croats) to sign the Dayton Accords, which established a loose federation and provided an international military occupation force and a United Nations High Representative to enforce the West's diktat.

The events leading up to the intervention in Bosnia underscored a peculiar Western attitude regarding the turmoil in the former Yugoslavia. As Doug Bandow, the Robert Taft Fellow at the American Conservative Defense Alliance, has noted, US and European officials seemed to believe that every ethnic faction in the disintegrating Yugoslav federation had a right to secede—except the Serbs. Indeed, the Serbs became the designated villains in what Western leaders and the Western media portrayed as a political morality tale. Although all factions in the Bosnian civil war committed atrocities, people in the West came away with the impression that only the Serbs were guilty of such offenses—which were hyped as "genocide." The Serbs came away as nationalistic, if not fascistic, brutes. Conversely, Bosnian Muslims were portrayed as both innocent victims and secular democrats.

Deliso is the latest in a series of experts on the Balkans to provide compelling evidence that the reality was quite different from the image that became dominant in the West. Even during the earliest stages of the break-up of Yugoslavia, religious activists in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries saw the Balkans as a potential arena for the growth of both their religious doctrine and their political influence. Riyadh began to send money to build mosques and to establish schools to propagate the Wahhabi version of Islam, an especially virulent, intolerant, and anti-Western variant. When the fighting intensified in Bosnia, not only did that...