How Can We Fix Clinton’s Error in Bosnia?

I feel duped because I supported the actions we took against the Serbs in 1999. The Clinton Administration and our media never told us that the atrocities committed by the Serbians were a response to centuries of brutalities by Muslims on them or that, in routing the Serbs from Bosnia and Kosovo, we were aiding and abetting Al Qaeda in their reconquest of Europe. I remember having serious reservations about our policy concerning Bosnia and Kosovo, especially since we were bombing a Christian ally during WWII and aiding Nazi supporters who also happened to be Muslims. Was our policy based on getting some good will among Muslims? If so, there is no evidence that it succeeded. If anything, any effort to appease the Islamic murderers only invokes their ridicule. Maybe the best you can say for it is that it did stop the violence on the ground.

Accuracy In Media:
“Of all the whoppers told by former President Clinton in his Chris Wallace interview, perhaps the most outrageous was his claim that he was involved in "trying to stop a genocide in Kosovo..." In fact, Clinton's bombing of the former Yugoslavia killed more people than died in this "genocide." And his policy benefited Osama bin Laden and the global Jihad.

In the year before the bombing, some 2,000 people had been killed in a civil war in Kosovo. A conservative estimate is that 6,000 were killed by U.S. and NATO bombs.

It's strange as well that Clinton complained to Wallace about the "neocons" attacking him when many of the same neocons in 1999 supported Clinton's war on Yugoslavia. The war was never approved by the U.N. or the U.S. Congress, and in fact violated the War Powers Act. The main beneficiary of the intervention was a Muslim terrorist group, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), with links to bin Laden, who had declared war on America in 1996, bombed our embassies in Africa in 1998, and would later, of course, orchestrate 9/11.

When former CIA official Michael Scheuer says that the Clinton Administration "had eight to ten chances" to kill bin Laden and "they refused to try," he is making a statement that goes far beyond acknowledging Clinton Administration incompetence or a lack of will. The fact is that Clinton had a pro-Muslim foreign policy that actually benefited bin Laden and facilitated 9/11. Most Republicans don't mention this because too many of them were duped into backing Clinton's misguided policy in Kosovo. President Bush, then a candidate, even backed U.S. military intervention there through NATO.

Scheuer's CIA also has a lot to answer for. It is noteworthy that the CIA issued a January 2000 report that essentially whitewashed the nature of the KLA and claimed it was pro-American. The only public release of this dubious report came through Rep. Elliot Engel, in a posting on the website of the National Albanian American Council, which supports an Albanian Muslim takeover of Kosovo.

That report was prepared under CIA Director George Tenet, who on February 2, 1999, gave testimony referring to the Serb "massacre at Raçak," which provided the pretext for NATO intervention against Serbia but which turned out to be a hoax. Tenet was, of course, kept on by President Bush. Not only were Tenet's fingerprints all over the failed and deceptive policy in Kosovo, he told Bush that finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a slam dunk.

Interestingly, Al-Jazeera celebrated the fifth anniversary of 9/11 by airing several al-Qaeda videos, one of which showed two of the 9/11 hijackers saying their actions were designed to avenge the suffering of Muslims in Bosnia and Chechnya. Nothing demonstrates the bankruptcy of the Clinton policy more than that. Not only did Clinton order the CIA to help the KLA in Kosovo, he approved Iranian arms shipments to the Bosnian Muslims, in order to help them establish a Muslim state in Bosnia. Still, that wasn't good enough for the Jihadists. Nothing appeases them.

The Clinton policy of supporting the same extremist Muslim forces in Europe that subsequently attacked us on 9/11 is far more controversial than the policy of regime change in Iraq, which was officially a policy of Clinton, Bush and the Congress. Kosovo was never a threat to the U.S., and Serbia didn't even pretend to have weapons of mass destruction…..”

I am well aware that Accuracy in Media is a very conservative website whose postings need to be taken with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, there have been many rumblings of late that our policies toward the former Yugoslavia were naïve and uninformed, that we supported the wrong side, and that the main job of NATO and American forces there now is to combat the Muslim terrorism we let loose. I would welcome anyone’s thoughts on this.