The Neo-Colonialists

In his Falwell-like "we had it coming to us" whine at Georgetown University last week, Bill Clinton went through his usual routine of blaming everybody but himself for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. It was an odd, yet typical omission. Throughout the 1990s his administration collaborated with Osama bin Laden in sponsoring Islamist terror in the Balkans and Central Asia. When the administration had a chance to get its hands on bin Laden, it passed up the opportunity. According to The Washington Post, Sudan in 1996 offered to hand bin Laden over to the United States. The Clinton administration rejected the offer. Former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger explains: "The FBI did not believe we had enough evidence to indict bin Laden at that time, and therefore opposed bringing him to the United States."

The United States is well-known for its scrupulous adherence to international law and due legal process. Evidence for this is the decade-long bombing of Iraq, the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia and even the current campaign against Afghanistan.

According to the Post, Sudan also offered to hand bin Laden over to the Saudis. That offer, too, was rejected. Instead, the U.S. asked Sudan to kick him out of the country. Former Sudanese defense minister Maj. Gen. Elfatih Erwa recalls telling the administration: "[H]e will go to Afghanistan, and they said, 'Let him.'" Clinton's policy is all the more amazing when one recalls that two years after the rejection of this offer, the United States bombed Sudan, destroying its chief pharmaceutical factory, on the grounds that Sudan was too pro-bin Laden.

U.S. benevolence toward bin Laden continued almost up to Sept. 11. A few days ago Le Figaro reported that in July bin Laden underwent kidney treatment at an American hospital in Dubai. While there he met with a CIA agent. Bin Laden was treated by Dr. Terry Callaway, a specialist in kidney stones and male infertility. "During the hospital stay, the local CIA agent, known to many in Dubai, was seen taking the main elevator of the hospital to go to bin Laden's hospital room," Le Figaro reports. "A few days later, the CIA man bragged to a few friends about having visited bin Laden."

A couple of days after the publication of this story, the CIA agent was identified as Larry Mitchell. The CIA vehemently denies the allegation, as does the Dubai hospital, though not, so far as one can gather, Callaway. The story may be nonsense, but it is uncomfortably specific about names and dates. Moreover, Le Figaro can hardly be dismissed as a leftist anti-American rag.

Last week, the BBC current affairs program Newsnight reported that, prior to Sept. 11, the FBI had been told to back off from investigating the terrorist connections of one of bin Laden's relatives, Abdullah bin Laden. According to The Times of India, Abdullah was linked to "'the Saudi-funded World Association of Muslim Youth (WAMY), a suspected terrorist organization,' whose accounts have still not been frozen by the US treasury 'despite being banned by Pakistan some weeks ago and India claiming it was linked to an organization involved in bombing in Kashmir.'" The Guardian reports: "FBI and military intelligence officials in Washington say they were prevented for political reasons from carrying out full investigations into members of the Bin Laden family in the US before the terrorist attacks of September 11." The FBI had investigated WAMY but closed its files in 1996 "before any conclusions could be reached."

Given the extent and sordidness of the U.S. connection with bin Laden stretching back over 20 years, one would have thought a reexamination of U.S. foreign policy might be in order in light of Sept. 11. The U.S. had backed bin Laden because the Islamist and secessionist terrorism that he sponsored served to destabilize states and to bring them under U.S. control. Osama bin Laden was the price of empire.

Yet the response of the pundits is to demand more American empire, not less. Here is Mark Steyn in The Spectator: "[C]olonialism is progressive and enlightened? Afghanistan needs not just food parcels, but British courts and Canadian police and Indian civil servants and American town clerks and Australian newspapers. So does much of the rest of the region." Max Boot in The Weekly Standard sounded the same theme: "Unlike 19th-century European colonialists, we would not aim to impose our rule permanently. Instead, as in Western Germany, Italy, and Japan, occupation would be a temporary expedient to allow the people to get back on their feet until a responsible, humane, preferably democratic, government takes over." Steyn wants to take over Afghanistan. Boot wants to take over Iraq and just about every other country in between.

Quite why 21st-century Western imperial rule will be any more successful than the 19th-century variety is never spelled out. The U.S. debacle in Vietnam and the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan are studiously ignored. These neo-colonialist ravings are the mirror-image of bin Laden's nonsense about crusades and infidels. We already know what the American empire will look like. We need only look at the Balkans today, whose tiny, weak, dependent and strife-torn states are run from Washington or Brussels. The people are demoralized and the chief industries are drug trafficking and trafficking in women. Thank you, Osama bin Laden, for all your efforts.