Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright is still ridiculed in some quarters for calling the United States the "indispensable nation." But to Kosovar Muslims rescued by U.S.-led NATO forces from a campaign of ethnic cleansing and now well on their way to nationhood, Albright's statement rings very much true.
Last week, the International Court of Justice held that the Republic of Kosovo's 2008 declaration of independence comports with international law. While the ruling was made on narrow and technical grounds, it nevertheless represented another step toward full Kosovar sovereignty. The one-third of the world's countries that have already recognized Europe's newest democracy welcomed the ICJ's decision. The Serbs - who just over a decade ago tried to exterminate their Muslim neighbors - came out strongly against it. The usual suspects, China and Russia, also grumbled irritably. Concerned about separatist movements within their own borders, democratic Spain and Greece shamefully refused to shift their rejectionist stances.
But these diplomatic maneuverings are far less important than the deeper meanings Kosovo's independence today holds for Muslims around the world - and for the American people.
It is to state the obvious to say that anti-Americanism among Muslims today has reached epidemic proportions. Some of this bad blood stems from legitimate grievances arising out of American foreign policy failures. But most of it is rooted in the desire to cast blame on a fictional American bogeyman for the failure of some Muslim societies to move forward. To fair-minded Muslims willing to question the hate preachers and conspiracists in their communities however, there is no better proof of America's fundamental decency than American leadership during the Kosovo crisis.
Prior to the intervention advocated by Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and led by General Wesley Clark, the Muslims of Kosovo had been subjected to unspeakable brutalities by Serbian butchers attempting Europe's first genocide since the Holocaust. While the U.S. and its allies did place a strategic premium on stability in a post-Cold War Eastern Europe, there is no denying that the intervention was primarily motivated by humanitarian concerns. Here was the U.S. government - the "Great Satan!" - putting American lives and treasure on the line in order to secure millions of Muslim lives.
Fast-forward to today: Americans are doing much the same thing. Our brave young men and women in uniform are sacrificing life and limb so Afghan girls can attend school and Iraqis can vote in free and fair elections. Yet too many in the Muslim world direct their vitriol at America rather than at the real villains in their midst: the obscurantist zealots throwing acid at schoolgirls in Kandahar and the vicious jihadists beheading poll workers in Baghdad.
If the lesson of Kosovo is tragically lost on too many Muslims, it should not be lost on the American people. We are the indispensable nation. Today, our confidence may be rattled by engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq that have ended up far longer and costlier than we anticipated. But when the next major Kosovo-style humanitarian crisis breaks out, who but the United States is going to effectively intervene to vindicate the human rights of those threatened with ethnic cleansing and similar horrors?
Conservatives often joke that, more than any individual peace activist, the United States military and Department of Defense deserve to be awarded the Nobel peace prize. President Obama seemed to agree with this sentiment when accepting his Nobel prize. As he put it, American military might "has been underwriting global security" since the end of WWII. That the beneficiaries of American insurance are sometimes ungrateful for the peace of mind we provide is no reason for the U.S. to disengage from the world and hunker down behind eyes and ears closed to injustice beyond our borders. To do so in a deeply interconnected world would not only be a dereliction of a uniquely American moral duty, but also a threat to our own vital security.
Sohrab Ahmari, a member of the American Islamic Congress' New England Council, has written on democratic reform in the Middle East for The Boston Globe, Commentary, and PBS | Frontline's Tehran Bureau.
let's not mix religion with the war/conflict in Kosovo. Kosovo Albanians and Albanians are highly secular people. Analyst writing about Kosovo and Albania tend to still use census data from 1936 about the religious distribution in the country. Please do keep in mind that Albania has been subject to a communist regime for more than 50 years where religion was banned.
Don't use the case of Kosovo to display and to draw a lesson how Muslim countries should realize the good intentions of US. The last legacy Kosovo and Albania had with Islam dates back to the Ottoman empire.
I'm refraining myself from commenting the rest of the article as I find the analogy quite a fallacy instead.
The many countries that do not recognize Kosovo have good reasons. There are still more than 200,000 refugees from Kosovo and it looks like they will never be able to return. Kosovo's minorities live in a desparate state of discrimination and harassment and many are leaving.
One has to be naive to believe that it is good for the Muslim world that the US is supporting such an ugly state. In fact it is just as bad as the fact that the US supports all kinds of dictatorships in the Arab world.
Kosovo has reason to be thankful that for it's future and acknowledgement of it's dead; but the US still has not seen through the deceptions of the Cold-war and War-on-Terrorism. One example is West Papua; and nation which saved thousands of Americans during WW-ii but was betrayed and is still a COLONY under US paid guns and Indonesian militia. The US operates the world's largest gold & third largest copper mine in a COLONY; victim of Mitchell bombers (donated by the US to Indonesia), rockets, and the establishment of an oppressive military and militia presence across Papua. It is not part of Asia, it's people are Melanesian (like Australian aboriginals and people from Fiji to Vanuatu); it's culture is Melanesian, it's history is that it supported the US and Australia against the Japanese and Java's Axis forces during the Pacific war.
In 1962 Kennedy was tricked by McGeorge Bundy & Robert Lovett into writing the New York Agreement. Indonesia has restricted media access since 1963! I hope HuffingtonPost readers will understand West Papua is a "colony", and deserves our support for independence from Jakarta.
Also, this article is absurd to say that Muslims are only mad at a propped up "Great Satan". We have undermined legitimate leaders and social reform (when was the last time you heard anyone angry at Saudi Arabia, where women have basically the same lack of rights they enjoyed under the Taliban, with a few notable improvements, but they can still be stoned/beheaded based essentially on suspicion alone), propped up despots (Saddam Hussein, the Shah of Iran, the Saudi royal family, to name a few). If we are a boogeyman... we are very real.