For much of World War II, Joseph Stalin called upon the Allies to open a second front. His reasons were transparent -- he wanted Germany to have to divide its forces -- but they were also sound. It is in that very same spirit that I suggest the United States open a second front in its war against terrorism. I propose Bosnia.
Specifically, I suggest that the United States drop in unannounced and arrest Radovan Karadzic, formerly the president of the Bosnian Serbs and currently an indicted war criminal. While we are at it, we also ought to get -- dead or alive, as the saying goes -- his former military commander, Ratko Mladic. He too is wanted for crimes against humanity.
As it happens, the victims of those alleged crimes were mostly Muslims. About 6,000 of them were massacred in 1995 at Srebrenica alone -- a slaughter perpetrated near a cowed contingent of Dutch peacekeepers. Mladic, a figure reminiscent of the Holocaust, was on the scene. His involvement is beyond doubt.
Together, Karadzic and Mladic waged a campaign of terror and genocide against Bosnia's Muslims. Their goal was to make their envisioned state free of Muslims (and Croats) by inducing most of them to flee and killing the ones who remained. In their mad view, they were continuing the centuries-old conflict between Christians and, as they would have it, "Turks."
In much of the Muslim world, the war against terrorism, limited for the moment to Afghanistan's Taliban regime and its guests, Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda organization, is seen as an attack on Islam itself. Bin Laden made just that argument in his most recent videotape, and other, more moderate Islamic spokesmen and leaders have said something similar. Even the off-hand utterance of the word "crusade" by President Bush triggered alarms in the region, as if Dubya had any idea of what he was saying or the Sept. 11 attacks were not reason enough to go to war.
Nonetheless, even Islamic moderates seem to be sniffing glue from an anti-American tube. The semi-official Egyptian press has even accused the United States of "deliberately" bombing Red Cross facilities in Afghanistan and of dropping "genetically treated" food into Afghanistan "with the aim of affecting the health of the Afghan people." This from Al Ahram, whose editor, Ibrahim Nafi, is a crony of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Imagine if he were not a moderate.
Only a naif would think that the capture or deaths of Karadzic and Mladic would in and of itself bring the America-haters in the Islamic world to their senses. It would not remove the irritant of the Israeli-Palestinian situation, and it would do nothing to ameliorate the clash between Western modernity and Eastern tradition. As for the Islamic world's anti-Semites, they will find some way to blame the Jews and their purported lackey, America, no matter what.
Still, it might help. It would give the Bush administration a debating point -- not to mention a needed lift -- in the propaganda war that, alas, is going about as well as the actual one in Afghanistan. It might also remind the Islamic world that in yet another part of the Balkans, Kosovo, the United States and NATO came to the rescue of Muslims, the ethnic Albanians.
Not only would it be in our self-interest to put the cuffs on Karadzic and Mladic but it's also the right thing to do. The two are the personification of the term "war criminal." They established concentration camps the likes of which had not been seen in Europe since World War II. They countenanced -- if not ordered -- torture, starvation, rape and murder. They authorized the sniper attacks on civilians in Sarajevo, and they used U.N. peacekeepers as human shields. They have the mentality of Nazis without the might and expertise of Germany. Still, they tried.
Little by little, the alleged war criminals indicted by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague have been picked up. Thirty are being sought, among them Karadzic and Mladic. To take them would hardly be easy, but if we are looking for bin Laden in all of vast Afghanistan then surely we can find two men in little Bosnia. What keeps Karadzic and Mladic free is not their cunning but our lack of will. If Bonnie and Clyde had gotten the same treatment, they would have died in a retirement community.
I do not casually propose that even more Americans lose their lives -- and taking Karadzic and Mladic might mean that. But their crimes are monstrous and their victims mostly Muslims. This would be the happy marriage of justice with self-interest -- a second front that at least should be given a second thought.
