07/12/07 – Brendan O’Neill – The Scott Horton Show

All right, folks, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Radio Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, and introducing our guest today, Brendan O'Neill.
He is the editor of Spiked Online.
He's written for just about every newspaper in the world, including the Sunday Times, the Guardian, Salon, Slate, American Prospect, the American Conservative, Reason, the Christian Science Monitor, and a couple of dozen others.
He's working on a book right now called Bosnia to Beslan, How the West Spread Al-Qaeda, and he's got a new one in the American Conservative magazine called The Bosnian Connection, the civil war that inspired both liberal hawks and Islamic jihadists.
Welcome to the show, Brendan.
Hi.
Good to be here.
Yeah, it's good to have you on.
It's a very interesting article here in the American Conservative magazine, but in fact, before we get to that, if it's okay with you, I wanted to...
There was this great quote.
Oh, here, I got the right window open now here.
I saw this at your most recent blog entry, that's Spiked Online.
You're talking about Ayman al-Zawahiri's new tape and how al-Qaeda represents the culture of victimhood that, I guess, originated in California somewhere and is now spread across the West.
And I love this quote.
So here we have a terrorist...
Oh, I'm sorry.
This is Zawahiri lashing out about Salman Rushdie being knighted.
You're right.
So here we have a terrorist who's stuck in a dugout criticizing a queen who has long since ceased to have any real power for awarding a writer who made a perceived insult against Islam 18 years ago with an order of chivalry for his contributions to an empire that does not exist.
Yeah.
I think that really sums up the whole war against terror.
The whole thing is captured in that bizarre statement made by al-Zawahiri.
It really is kind of like an episode of Monty Python, isn't it?
Indeed.
Yes, absolutely.
And this is something...
A friend of mine named Chad made the observation that in American society, and apparently this is the way it works in Europe and even in the East now, too, there's no longer any difference between a victim and a hero.
We can't differentiate those things.
So if you can't do anything wonderful, you can at least cry about all the terrible things that are happening to you instead.
That's right.
Yeah.
And I really do think al-Qaeda is the most extreme expression of that.
It really does feed off and feed into the victim culture.
And on a more serious note, I do think that, in reference to the American conservative piece, I think that has its origins in many ways in the Bosnian conflict.
It was really that conflict which allowed Muslims, or some Muslims, to begin to view themselves as the victims of a terrible international conspiracy.
And if you look at bin Laden's statements over the past 10 or 15 years, he often says things like, the West doesn't care about Muslims, the West neglected us in Bosnia, the West allowed us to be slaughtered by the barbarian Serbs, and a lot of his anger and his feeling of humiliation, which he thinks justifies his violence, comes from the kind of arguments that were used during the Bosnian conflict.
I think that's a very, it's an interesting journey from what happened in Bosnia to the way in which al-Qaeda now executes acts of what I would call violent victimhood.
And it's interesting because, you know, like Seymour, or pardon me, Michael Schoyer in his book, Imperial Hubris, he lists the six very concrete foreign policies that bin Laden cites as reasons why people ought to join his movement and, you know, kill Jews and Crusaders and so forth like that.
But you're pointing out here that really all of his rhetoric is really heavily loaded with this boo-hoo, poor me, rather than just, you know, hey, they're occupying our land and killing our people, and that's not right.
It's actually full of all this kind of left-wing complaining.
It really is.
And if you read his statements carefully, you'll notice that he says, he sometimes talks about occupation and things like that, but he most often talks about humiliation and degradation.
And he talks about how the Muslims have been humiliated and embarrassed and, you know, had their dignity taken away by the West.
And he talks about, you know, how the West ignores Muslim victims.
We don't shed tears for Muslim victims, we only shed tears for Western victims.
And it really is this kind of, it's like he's demanding recognition of his suffering in the way in which, throughout the West, as you say, in the therapy culture, there is now a general trend towards seeking recognition for your pain and seeking recognition for your suffering and your trials and tribulations.
And I think al-Qaeda does the same thing.
Its bombs are really bombs for recognition.
It's a demand that we feel their pain, we recognize their suffering.
It's very different from the kind of political violence of the past, which was political violence designed to win territory or to win an argument or to win a political goal.
I think what we have with al-Qaeda is really therapeutic violence, violence aimed at, you know, winning our pity and our sympathy and, you know, and having an equality of victimhood.
And you know, they may have a point, I mean, to the degree that they're whining, I guess we can make fun of them, but well, for example, I just finished reading through this new article by Chris Hedges in The Nation magazine, where they've gone through and talked with dozens and dozens of veterans about what it's like to be an occupying soldier in Iraq.
And what they talk about is how they kill civilians all the time and how they call them hajis so that it's okay.
And you know, from bin Laden's point of view, that seems like a pretty legitimate complaint.
Yeah.
Well, there's no question that the West, as I've written and as Antiwar.gov has covered brilliantly over the past number of years, there's no question that the West is oppressing and causing huge problems in the Middle East with its invasions, its support for various problematic regimes and so on.
But what's interesting about al-Qaeda, as distinct from Fatah and Hamas and Hezbollah and various other groups, which I think are different, what's interesting about al-Qaeda, it doesn't, it's not really a political response to those problems.
It's not really a liberationist response to those issues.
It's more a kind of, as you say, whining, complaining response.
So I think it's, you know, al-Qaeda is right on one level, in the sense that, you know, obviously, the West is causing huge problems in the Middle East.
But what's interesting about them is they don't provide a political solution to it.
Right.
Well, and that's really because as you define in your article here, what we're talking about is a group of people who couldn't possibly be the government of anything.
They're a bunch of leftover jihadist fighters from the Afghan war against the Russians that the West supported.
And now they're out of work.
They're not the type of people who could set up a government, even if they tried to.
They're, they're the, they're the soldiers.
That's right.
I think what's most striking about al-Qaeda, I mean, I would say that they're the creation of two periods of Western intervention.
Firstly, the one that most people are familiar with, which was Western intervention in Afghanistan in the late seventies and throughout the eighties, when, as we all know very well, America and Britain in particular pumped millions of pounds into dollars into training and arming and propagandizing on behalf of the Mujahideen there.
And that's where al-Qaeda first came together.
That's where bin Laden first became kind of recruiter of international holy warriors to fight against the Soviets at the time.
And then the second period of Western intervention, which is discussed much less, is Bosnia and what happened there.
And it's interesting because it happens at precisely the time that Afghanistan becomes a problem for the Mujahideen in 1992, when, you know, the Soviets withdrew in 1989.
And between 1989 and 1992, Afghanistan began to descend into civil war between various Mujahideen factions.
And the foreign Mujahideen found it very difficult to go back home because Algeria and Egypt and various other regimes were imprisoning and repressing, returning Mujahideen forces.
So what happened for them, which was very convenient in many ways, is the Bosnian War breaks out in 1992.
As you have a kind of massive movement of Mujahideen from Afghanistan into Bosnia, between about 1,500 and 3,000 went there altogether.
And they joined with the Bosnian Muslim Army, which at the time was being armed and trained by American forces.
And lots of the Mujahideen were directly inspired and enthused and inflamed by Western media coverage.
Lots of the Mujahideen who went to Bosnia, they went there because they read media stories about concentration camps and rape camps.
They read about how awful and evil the Serbs were.
And so in many ways, I would argue that the Mujahideen were created by Western intervention in Afghanistan, but they were globalized with the help of Western intervention in Bosnia.
So I think that's the key thing.
The seed was sown in Afghanistan, but it really flourished and grew and became something quite terrible as a result of the Bosnian conflict.
Now, did the governments in Great Britain and the United States know that, hey, the bin Laden types are sending their shock troops from all over the world to come to Bosnia to fight and that that's whose side we're taking?
Yes.
The British government didn't have involvement.
The British government had a fairly hands-off approach during the Bosnian conflict, mostly, although its diplomatic interventions were often quite problematic and exacerbated tensions on all sides.
But the American government, particularly under Clinton from 1993 onwards, were well aware that the Bosnian Muslim army had large numbers of Mujahideen in its rank.
I've got UN communiques from 93, 94, and 95 in which United Nations officials on the ground in Bosnia are saying to each other, there are 700 and then 1,000 and then 1,200 Mujahideen in the Bosnian Muslim army.
They're quite uncontrollable, they're quite violent, they are doing terrible things.
It was very widely known.
And at precisely that time, America was secretly supplying the Bosnian Muslim army with weapons and training, and also it was protecting the movement of finances from radical Islamic charities in Sudan and the Middle East, protecting the money from these charities into Bosnia.
The Washington Post reported in 1996 that American officials on the ground in Bosnia told other officials not to interfere with these movements of money from radical Islamic charities into Bosnia and to allow them to continue because it was sympathetic to the Bosnian Muslim cause and wanted the Bosnian Muslims to be armed and to be financed.
So America played quite the key role in allowing the movement of Mujahideen into Bosnia, and particularly in training the military machine that the Mujahideen were attached to.
And in 1995 in particular, as the Bosnian civil war was coming to its horrendous, bloody conclusion, the Mujahideen were used quite regularly by the Bosnian Muslim army, and they were used as shock troops, kind of attack dog forces.
They were often sent in at the beginning of a Bosnian Muslim army expedition.
They would be sent off at the start to kind of do some really terrible damage, to spread fear into the Serb forces, and then the Bosnian Muslim army would follow on and continue the fighting.
So they were used in a very serious and quite up-front fashion by an army that was being armed by Washington.
You're listening to Antiwar Radio, I'm Scott Horton, I'm on the phone with Brendan O'Neill from London, England.
He's the editor of Spiked Online.
He's working on a book right now called Bosnia to Beslan, How the West Spread Al Qaeda.
And now, Brendan, if I remember right, there was kind of a political correctness about the backing of the Mujahideen in the 1990s, and the Muslims all around in the Bosnian conflict and later the Kosovo conflict, and if I remember right, it was even said at the time, I don't know if by the administration or only in the press, that this was kind of an attempt to head off the culture war, to head off the clash of civilizations, to show the Muslims that we care about them too, and that sort of thing.
And that's why Bill Clinton did such a good job of backing the Mujahideen and so forth.
Yeah, I've heard the argument put forward by many people as well, and lots of people will now say, why are the Muslims so angry with us?
Don't they remember that we supported them in Bosnia and we supported them in Kosovo?
I think it's important in this discussion to remember just how kind of quite cynical and opportunistic American support for the Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo was.
I don't think it was driven by real practical sympathy for the Muslims there.
I think it was driven by real politic considerations and by a desire on the part of Washington to reestablish its moral credentials, to show that it's a powerful military and moral force, and to throw its weight around in the post-Cold War, ever-changing European field, to kind of reassert its authority on that level.
And I think it was just quite convenient for them to attach themselves to the Muslim side and also to demonize the Serbs in a quite dramatic fashion.
And so the irony, of course, is that while people say that this was an attempt, as you say, to offset claims of a clash of civilizations, in fact, it exacerbated those problems because the Bosnian War was presented very much in terms of a straightforward black and white conflict between good and evil with the Muslims as a kind of good victims and the Serbs as the kind of terrible, awful, fascistic, Nazi-style, wicked murderers.
And that was the very, very simplistic presentation of the war by the State Department and by a huge number of quite slavish journalists, actually.
So it's ironic that, in fact, what the Bosnian conflict did was to recreate the clash of civilizations' idea in a new way and to give rise to a very moralistic, almost religious view of international affairs, which, of course, has now been inherited by President Bush.
And of course, just further expanded upon the lesson that bin Laden and his friends learned in fighting the Russians, which was, if you just believe in God enough, you can defeat anybody.
And here we just helped them prove it again, right, by helping them gain their independence from Serbia and so forth.
That's right.
I think what's quite interesting, I think, about the two fighting experiences that the Mujahideen had is that in Afghanistan, they were, the key thing about Afghanistan, I think, is that it brought together international forces.
It first gave certain holy warriors the idea that they could become an international, global force.
It gave them the idea, but it didn't make it reality.
And in fact, most of the Mujahideen who fought in Afghanistan were still defined by old Cold War ideas of kind of nation-state and ideology and fighting in order to create a government.
They were still restrained by those traditional Cold War ideas.
What happens then in Bosnia a few years later is that they're kind of liberated from those ideas, and they become, the Mujahideen in Bosnia were literally just a force who were there to fight against evil.
It was discussed in a very moralistic sense.
And the Mujahideen who went to Bosnia went there because, as Evan Coleman says in his book on the Mujahideen in Bosnia, he points out that they thought there was a very clear divergence between good and evil in Bosnia.
So what happens is that whereas in Afghanistan, the Mujahideen were, there was an element of control, they had limited aims, they were religious nationalists.
What happens then in Bosnia is that they're let loose from those old ideas, and they become a purely moralistic force, tackling evil, as the West described it.
So I think that's really key to the transformation of the Mujahideen from religious nationalists as they were in the 80s to what they are today, which is a very brutal, supermoralized force who see themselves as kind of having no responsibility to nation-state, they don't recognize any borders, and they execute acts to express a really kind of moralistic outrage.
Wow, who would have thought that actions have consequences, that's incredible.
You know, you even indicate in your article that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Yousef's uncle and the guy that ran the September 11th attack, that he and at least two of the hijackers had experience fighting in Bosnia, is that right?
That's correct, yeah.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two of the hijackers either trained or fought in Bosnia.
So did one of the suspects in the Madrid train bombings, and in fact he was directly inspired to go to Bosnia by media coverage, by media coverage that claimed there was concentration camps there on a par with what happened in Nazi Germany.
He saw that, he went to Bosnia, he became moralized by that experience.
The people who oversaw the bombing of the African embassies in 1998 also had links to Bosnia.
There are numerous terrorist incidents over the past five to ten years where the practitioners or the financiers have all been people who fought or trained or worked somehow in relation to the Bosnian Mujahideen.
So in many ways, you know, people often talk about al-Qaeda as blowback for mistakes in the Cold War, as a kind of explosive force coming back to haunt us because of what Reagan and Thatcher did in the 1980s.
But in many ways, I think we ought to see al-Qaeda as blowback for Bosnia and as blowback for the West's moralization of that conflict and what it started to do in relation to Bosnia, which was to discuss international affairs in terms of good and evil.
I think al-Qaeda is blowback for that, and what we did in Bosnia is now coming back to haunt us in the form of a new terrifying form of terrorism.
Would I be right to say that the role of the Bosnian conflict in the creation, the formation and the internationalization, as you call it, of al-Qaeda is the most ignored part of the story?
I mean, this seems to me like something that is very rarely discussed when Bill Clinton took Osama's side in Bosnia.
Yeah, it's very rarely discussed.
A few more books are coming out now, and it's starting to be discussed more.
But it's worth remembering, of course, that huge sections of the Western media accepted the State Department's line on Bosnia, and in fact, they often wrote the State Department's line for it.
Journalists in America and Britain, in particular, were really quite vociferous in their denunciations of the Serbs as fascists and in their defense of the Muslims as a kind of pure, dignified force.
And it was really, they imposed a very simplistic fairy tale version of events onto what was in fact a horrid civil war in which all sides committed terrible atrocities.
And I think that very simplistic reading, the way in which the media invested so much of its energies into supporting Western intervention in Bosnia means that it's become a blind spot for them.
So they are not critically minded at all in relation to Bosnia.
As you know, there's an interesting professor at Amsterdam University called Professor C.V.
Bez, and he's written about the mujahideen in Bosnia, and his experience is that people always say to him, how can you say this?
He says that you are only allowed to see Bosnia in black and white, there's no critical thinking allowed.
And I think that's one reason why the mujahideen's role in Bosnia is not explored in very much detail.
I'm Scott Horton, I'm talking with Brendan O'Neill, the editor of Spiked Online.
And now, you mentioned in one of your answers, a couple of answers back there, that there were not ideological interests, but very real-world kind of interests at play in terms of American policymakers figuring out excuses to maintain military dominance over Europe.
And I remember actually around that time, I guess, Margaret Thatcher giving speeches denouncing the idea of the creation of a permanent European army outside of NATO.
And it was a big fight over whether Europe was going to have their own army and NATO was going to break up, or whether America would be able to surround old Europe with all the former Warsaw Pact states and bring them into NATO, which is basically, it seems like what happened.
So I guess, if all those kind of very high-level power politics are at play, then the left wing journalists and columnists and so forth, who supported this war were really just their willing dupes, basically, their useful dupes.
I think that's right.
I think it's really important to remember the role that the West played in causing the conflict in Bosnia and also in sustaining it over a period of three years.
And if we think not just America, but if we think about Germany's role, I mean, Germany coming out of the Cold War, newly reunited, decided to use the conflict in the Balkans as a way of reasserting its domination of Europe and its power.
So for example, Germany recognized Croatia early on in 1992, and that led to a deepening of tensions between Croatia and other forces and generated conflict as well.
Croatia got in on the act by recognizing Bosnia unilaterally, and as predicted, that led to an intensification of the conflict.
So I think the way in which the great powers kind of piled into the Balkans and also taking various different sides and arming or supporting or recognizing different sides really did exacerbate the conflict and sustained it over that period of time.
And I think journalists were in many ways their willing dupes, but they also, even more than that, I think they played a key role in encouraging the West to continue with its kind of great power clashes in the field of the Balkans.
So journalists played a very important role in arguing that this was a simple conflict between good and evil in demanding Western intervention.
So when Clinton eventually did get around to using NATO to bomb the Bosnian Serbs in 1995, he could say it was in response to demand.
It was in response to public concern and public demand as represented by these laptop bombardiers who were demanding continuously that the West should bomb the evil Serbs.
So I think on one level, it's absolutely correct, these journalists just swallowed up all the stuff that was told to them by the State Department and by other government agencies in the West.
And they also played an even more problematic role, which is that they in turn fed propaganda opportunities back to these Western governments.
And so there was a very strange and problematic alliance during that conflict between Western governments and journalists who just abandoned any sense of independence and went along with what was going on.
And now I want to pick on Christopher Hitchens here in a minute if I can, but first I wanted to go back to something that you just said about, well, Germany recognized Croatia and then America recognized Bosnia.
Help me out with this because I'm actually, you know, pretty ignorant about the Balkans war.
I mean, I know a lot about it, but then again, there's so much to know about it that my knowledge amounts to not very much, but can you confirm for me whether it was the case that basically Richard Holbrooke came and said, okay, we have these kind of vague borders that are not really enforced, but the country's breaking up and the different ethnicities are more or less moving from this side of the river to that side of the river and so forth.
And then is it the case that Holbrooke just said, okay, listen, all these soft lines are now hard national borders and that's what really left so many people quote unquote stuck on the wrong side of the lines and led to a lot of the killing?
Yeah, well, what happened is that there was obviously a great amount of division and tension in the Balkans, particularly following the end of the Cold War.
You know, Yugoslavia having been a kind of key, key aspect in Cold War politics in terms of the different things that it was balancing out, you know, it was kind of, it was very much influenced by the West, but it was also under the control of, you know, communist forces.
And so it fell out badly as a result of the end of the Cold War and the end of those old East West certainties.
So there was a rise of tensions, there were more conflicts between the various different groups who had been lumped together into the Yugoslav state.
But what I think Western intervention did is that it kind of tipped these tensions over the edge, imbued them with a kind of, you know, an international purpose, it kind of really stoked the flame, so to speak.
So when Germany recognized Croatia, almost straight away, there was conflict then, and the Croatian army, the Croatians began to arm, to train, to prepare themselves for war because they knew that once they'd been recognized, once they had succeeded, once they had become their own state, there would be repercussions as a result of that.
Similarly, when America unilaterally decided to recognize Bosnia-Herzegovina, a state which has, you know, Croatians, Muslims, and Serbs all within its borders, it was widely known and it was widely predicted, including by officials in the State Department, that that would lead to pretty terrible conflict.
And within days, conflict had began and then kind of went downhill from there.
So I think the Western powers played a very inflammatory game in the Balkans, where in order to boost their own standing and to assert their own power, they played a game of recognition and a game of one-upmanship, which meant that for the people on the ground, there was war and there was bloodshed, while the governments in the West could sit back and say, we've done our job, let's see what happens next.
Now, you say the State Department predicted it and then they went ahead anyway.
Were they doing this on purpose, trying to make the war worse, or they just didn't care?
Well, that's a very good question.
Who knows the answer to that?
But there were individuals within the State Department and other officials within Washington who said, if we take this action and recognize Bosnia, there will be a problem, there will be, it will intensify what's happening there.
So it was recognized.
But the question of why Washington did it, I mean, was there a conscious strategy?
I mean, that sounds a bit too much like a conspiracy theory to me, I have to say.
But certainly, it looked like a reckless act, and one which anyone with three or four brain cells would have known, would have led on to other problematic situations.
So I think there was an element of recklessness in it, an element of certainly wanting to stand up to Germany, which was getting more and more involved in the Balkans.
It was a real kind of drive to, all the various Western powers were attracted to the Balkans as a place where they could assert themselves, particularly in the kind of confusing period of the post Cold War era, assert themselves, assert their authority, assert their interests, and they didn't seem to have cared very much for the consequences on the ground.
Yeah, three or four brain cells, that would count.
Richard Holt broke out.
Yeah.
Okay, so now let's turn to some of the specifics in your article here.
Well, we've been covering some of them, but I want to turn to Christopher Hitchens, and your coverage of him in this article, it's called The Bosnian Connection, the civil war that inspired both liberal hawks and Islamist jihadis.
It's in the American Conservative magazine, and I'm sorry, I didn't look it up.
Is it online?
Or is it only in print?
Do you know?
I think it's only in print, but it's on my website.
Okay, there you go.
And that's, that's Brendan O'Neill dot net, right?
That's right.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yes, it's Brendan O'Neill.
He's the editor of Spiked Online.
And that's his own personal website, Brendan O'Neill dot net, where you can read this article, The Bosnian Connection.
And I just think this is funny, because I'm sure you probably saw just in the last couple of days, was it the new standard or one of these, one of these magazines came forward and said, Hey, everybody, look at this Christopher Hitchens article from 1976 about what a great guy Saddam Hussein is.
And, and so, you know, we all get a kick out of seeing, you know, one of the written words, most prominent warmongers, laptop bombardiers, as you call them, constantly switching back from who's a good guy and who's a bad guy.
And it's not just Saddam Hussein that he used to praise and, and then turn to demonize in the run up to war.
But it's the Mujahideen and the Al Qaeda movement in general used to used to have a very big fan in the form of Christopher Hitchens.
Is that right?
Yeah, well, one of the most interesting things of all, I think about the Bosnian conflict is one of the strangest alliances that took place during that conflict was a kind of alliance of a meeting of minds between liberal left wing journalists in the West, and holy warriors from the East.
And it's really striking because what I write about in the American conservative is the fact that, you know, Christopher Hitchens wrote a piece recently for Vanity Fair in which he was talking about the rise of radical Islam.
And he mentioned a guy called Omar Sheikh, who's a British Muslim, who was radicalized in the 1990s, and later went on to murder Daniel Pearl, he's now in prison in Pakistan.
And Hitchens uses him as an example of the problem of Islamic radicalism, which is sending these British citizens to, you know, turn crazy and so on.
And what I point out in my article, the really interesting thing is that actually, Christopher Hitchens and Omar Sheikh have a lot in common, which is they were both radicalized and transformed by the same thing, which was the war in Bosnia.
So Omar Sheikh saw footage of Bosnian Muslims being persecuted in 1992, when he was a student at the London School of Economics, and he took it upon himself to go to Bosnia, where he joined the Mujahideen, and then from there on, he kind of went into the life of terrorism.
At precisely the same time, in 1992, Hitchens also became transformed by what was happening to the Bosnian Muslims.
And he says that that was the thing that first got him interested in the neo comms, and first led him to realize that neo comm supported Western intervention was a good thing.
So what's really striking is that both this kind of crazy radical Islamist terrorists and this American British journalist became radicalized at the same time by the same thing, and they were on the same side.
And that happens across the board.
You realize that there are quite a few kind of liberal hawks out there, who today spend all their time denouncing al Qaeda, but who 15 years ago, were actually on the same side.
And the most vociferous supporters of the Bosnian Muslims and critics of the Bosnian Arabs were two sets of people, liberal journalists in the West, and holy warriors from the East.
And I think that's the most interesting thing.
And since then, there's been a divergence.
But it's worth, I think, people bearing in mind that both those groups of people have their origins in the Bosnian War, when they were definitely on the same side.
Interesting, too, that this is a time when Americans can look back and remember Republicans posing as though they were the peaceniks and saying, hey, what are we doing here?
What's the exit strategy?
We're not the policeman of the world.
Why are we backing al Qaeda in Bosnia, et cetera?
Yeah, well, that's a really good point, because I was thinking about this the other day.
And what's really striking is, I don't know if you remember, but when Clinton was running for president, he said he wouldn't go abroad very much.
You know, he'd stay at home.
And his big thing was, it's the economy, stupid.
And he promised that he would be kind of a home-based president.
And then, lo and behold, he gets into power.
And within months, he's in Bosnia.
And then later on, he bombs Iraq in 1998.
He bombs Kosovo and Yugoslavia again in 1999.
And that's really striking.
And then the exact same thing happens with the Bush administration, where in the run-up to when they were campaigning, remember Condoleezza Rice saying that America were going to be more isolationist and were going to kind of come home again.
And, you know, the complaint in Europe then was that, oh, no, we're going to lose America as a great force in the world because the Bushies are going to go home.
And then precisely the same thing happens.
They get into power, obviously 9-11 happens, and then they're in Afghanistan, they're in Iraq, and they become one of the most outwardly focused administrations in recent memory.
So I'm quite struck by that.
There seems to be something about getting into power, which kind of draws presidents and their administrations into conflict almost straight away.
So there's something interesting going on there, I think.
Well, and although in the case of Bush, I think he was simply lying because, of course, they bombed, they did, you know, cranked up the degree of the bombings of the no-fly zones within his first month in power.
They bombed the hell out of Iraq.
And of course, he answered in an interview during the silly Florida recount in the early winter at the end of the year 2000 there.
He was asked in an interview with 60 Minutes 2, what is the biggest threat in the world to America?
They said, Governor, you're being briefed by the CIA about all the different threats.
What's the biggest threat to America?
The answer was not Al-Qaeda or even China.
The answer was isolationism, the idea that somehow America ought to have its national sovereignty and protect it first.
That is the biggest threat to the national security of the United States.
That was his answer.
So, you know, all that stuff about a humble foreign policy was just a bunch of garbage for the rubes, and he had his fingers crossed when he said it in the first place.
I'm sure you're right.
I think one thing that's really interesting in all this, and this is something that I've argued a few times over the past few years, is that it's important, I think, to see the Bush administration's military interventionism as the natural successor to Bill Clinton and Tony Blair's interventionism in the 90s.
Because what you have today is that you have lots of kind of left-leaning or liberal journalists who are critical of Bush's wars, particularly in Iraq, and I think it's important to remind people that, in fact, the worst things about Bush's military interventionism he inherited directly from the humanitarians, as they call themselves, under Clinton and Blair.
So, for example, let's just take two things.
Two of the worst things, I think, about Bush's warmongering is, firstly, his kind of disregard for state sovereignty, where, you know, state borders and state sovereignty doesn't matter.
You know, if the West is right, it can go wherever it likes and do whatever it wants.
The second thing is his kind of supermoralized view of the world, where everything is good and evil, and he has this kind of pseudo-religious view of America is good and other forces around the world is evil.
Both of those things come directly from Clinton and Blair and the humanitarians and the liberal hawks who cheer-led Western intervention in the 90s.
It was Clinton and Blair who said that the old system of state sovereignty has to come to an end.
We need an international community that can go around the world and fix everyone's problems.
And it was also Clinton and Blair who first used that very simplistic moral language to discuss conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo and Iraq and Sierra Leone as good and evil, black and white.
And so I think we should always remind people that, you know, yes, Bush is doing pretty shocking things and it's terrible, but let's look at where this comes from so that we can really understand its origins and criticize all the people who've been involved in allowing this to happen.
And, yeah, it was the precedent set, too, because in the first Gulf War you had one sovereign state invading another, but in the 1990s, under Clinton and Blair, it was civil wars that they decided they could go ahead and get involved in conflicts going on entirely within states and so forth.
And they didn't need the UN Security Council.
Not that I think the UN Security Council has any authority to declare war against anybody, but they went ahead and went around it and used NATO instead when Russia and China vowed to veto.
Yeah, that's right.
I think that's another striking thing.
Lots of people will now say that the war in Iraq is illegal, and strictly speaking it is, but they forget that lots of those people supported the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, which was also, strictly speaking, illegal.
But I agree with you.
I think it's a really important point about we should not accept that the United Nations Security Council has the right to say that war can take place.
So when people say to me, the problem with the war in Iraq is that it's illegal, I always say to them, well, would it have been okay if it was legal?
If the UN Security Council had said, yes, go ahead, would that have made it okay?
And in fact, I would argue that the only thing worse than an illegal war is a legal one, because a legal war would require even more Western states in agreement that Iraq or somewhere else thought to be bombed, even more Western powers lined up against it, all having voted for this conflict.
So if anything, the idea of a legal war, one which has the support of the whole UN, is more terrifying than the illegal war we see at the moment.
Of course, the only real justified war, if any war could be justified, would be a defensive one.
Because the UN Security Council supposed authority to sanction an aggressive war, to sanction the beginning of a war.
Yes, that's right.
And also, I think it's important to recognize that international law is something of a contradiction in terms.
You know, that law is something that grows fairly organically from a nation state and from the people who live in that state and from their needs and their desires.
The idea of international law is, by definition, basically Western imperialism dressed up in legal language, which is this idea that there are standards that can be set by the UN or by Washington, and that anyone who doesn't live up to them can be attacked and bombed and have its sovereignty undermined.
Well, I sure wish we had more time, but we're all out of it, everybody.
BrendanO'Neill.net is the website.
Brendan O'Neill is a journalist and the editor of Spiked Online.
He's got a new book coming out soon called Bosnia to Beslan, How the West Spread Al-Qaeda.
And his new article in the American Conservative Magazine, which you can read at BrendanO'Neill.net, is The Bosnian Connection, the civil war that inspired both liberal hawks and Islamist jihadis.
Thanks very much for your time today, Brendan.
Appreciate it.
Thank you very much for your time, and I'll see you in the next one.