With the 10th anniversary of the Dayton Peace Accords yesterday, every liar, calumnist and imbecile in the mainstream media has felt the need to flap their gums about it, preferably in the context of paeans to American interventionism, empire and “commitment.” In the same breath that praises the Clintonian Empire for ending the “genocide” in Bosnia, they parrot the current party line that Dayton needs to be revised and abolished, because it simply doesn’t work any more.
“Stephen Schwartz” (a.k.a. Suleyman Ahmad), that old champion of the Islamic cause, goes a step further, claiming that Dayton was unfair (“not felicitous,” to use his flowery prose) to the Muslims of Bosnia. Under its provisions, the 45% (sic!) “plurality”saw “Muslim Bosnia” (sic) reduced to 28% of the country’s territory, just as they “had created a real army that was winning their land back.”
Most of his article in yesterday’s online “Weekly Standard” is the standard prattle of Muslim (or is it “Bosniak”? Ahmad himself doesn’t use the term, strangely enough) apologists: Croatia and Serbia conspired to carve up Bosnia, and were held off only by the lone efforts of heroic and virtuous Alija Izetbegovic; Britain, France and Russia conspired to help the Serb “aggressors” and stop the military intervention on the Muslim side, the only just solution to the war; etc.
As written, Dayton was indeed a defeat of Izetbegovic’s vision of a centralized Bosnian state dominated at every level by his Muslim plurality, which he considered the outright majority and therefore the rightful owner of the country. As implemented, Dayton has pandered to Izetbegovic and his fanatics for a decade, forcing Bosnia back into the unworkable and abuse-prone “citizen state” system that existed in 1991, and caused the conflict in the first place. That is indeed “not felicitous,” but mostly for Bosnia’s non-Muslims – precisely the opposite of what “Schwartz” says.
Another interesting “argument” is his assertion that “only Izetbegovic had not attempted to seize his neighbors’ territory.” The only way this can actually be true is if Izetbegovic is considered to have claim to all of Bosnia (and even then, there is a matter of wishing to annex parts of Serbia and Montenegro with a sizeable Muslim minority). But what of the Serbs and Croats of Bosnia? Are they not Izetbegovic’s neighbors, indeed the rightful claimaints to Bosnia in equal measure to the Muslims? Doesn’t attempting to assert Muslim dominion over the entire country qualify as seizing [i]their[/i] territory?
Saving the “best” of this reasoning for last, “Schwartz” riffs on Roger Cohen’s turgid commentary in the [i]New York Times[/i] yesterday – thankfully preserved from intelligent humanity by the NYT’s subscription service. Cohen shouldn’t compare Bosnia to Iraq, he says; Bosnian Sunni Muslims are friendly to the US, and haven’t killed a single American so far. The [i]real[/i] parallel is between the Bosnian Serbs and Iraqi Sunnis! “Both have a history as minorities enjoying domination over, and exploitation of, larger communities whose ways remain incomprehensible to the outside world,” he says.
This is disingenuous drivel. Bosnian Serbs have not “dominated” anyone – it was the Muslims’ agenda of domination that set off the war, with both Croats and Serbs, and even other Muslims fighting Izetbegovic’s [i]mujahideen[/i]. Bosnian Serbs have not engaged in suicide bombings, roadside bombings, or bombings of any kind, for that matter. It wasn’t the Muslims that Bosnia’s NATO occupiers have been worried about, but the Serbs – yet despite the years of abuses by the same international viceroys “Schwartz” sees as holding the Muslims’ aspirations back (yet another complete inversion of reality), the Bosnian Serbs have done nothing to harm the occupying forces. Every American soldier who’s been to Bosnia is keenly aware of this.
When the postmortems of American Empire are written, some time in the not too distant future, it will be noted that American understanding of Bosnia had been shaped for decades by an inundation of deliberate lies. If “Stephen Schwartz” is even mentioned in this context, it will be as someone whose lies had the particularly vile quality about them, and this pathetic tirade from the “Weekly Standard” could serve as a good illustration.