The Lost Decade: a Reevaluation

Thomas Friedman’s column today in the Times offers more food for thought on the Mladic-Bin Laden comparison I made in my last post. Ranking the “evilness” of men like Mladic or Bin Laden in terms of lives lost is necessarily reductionist, and Friedman shows us why: Bin Laden has cost America — and the world — much more than the lives he took on 9/11 or in the bombing of the USS Cole. The crazed actions of one man touched off two wars and a spiraling national deficit, as well as the loss of American moral authority and the good will of Muslims across the world. The price Bin Laden exacted from the U.S. includes an opportunity cost: what we could have achieved in the absence of a war on terror, or what we could have purchased with our treasure and influence if we had not sunk both into the pursuit of Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Friedman enumerates the opportunities America, its allies and its enemies have ceded to Bin Laden:

• Political and social progress in the Arab world. Far from spreading democracy, Bush’s wars created only strange bedfellows. Even today, Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh receives little more than a slap on the wrist, because chaos in the center of the jihadist movement would be even more disastrous than a dictatorship. Friedman writes, “Washington basically gave the Arab dictators a free pass to tighten their vise grip on their people — as long as these Arab leaders arrested, interrogated and held the Islamic militants in their societies and eliminated them as a threat to us.”
• Domestic prosperity. Friedman makes a convincing connection between 9/11 and Bush’s ruinous fiscal policy: “In America, President George W. Bush used the post-9/11 economic dip to push through a second tax cut we could not afford . . . . As such, our nation’s fiscal hole is deeper than ever.”
• Israeli-Palestinian relations. Friedman notes that “the rise of Bin Laden, which diverted the U.S. from energetically pursuing the peace process, gave the Israeli right a free hand to expand West Bank settlements.”

The effects on Europe of the war in Bosnia and Serbia are certainly myriad, and mostly beyond the scope of my knowledge. I realize that the genocidal brutality of Mladic and his ilk have left the former Yugoslavia a tattered mess. But from where I stand in America, my view of the world filtered through the lens of American power and its far-reaching effects, I can’t help but reevaluate my stance on the respective damages done by Mladic and Bin Laden. Friedman calls the past ten years “the Bin Laden decade.” It is in many ways, not just for Eastern Europe but for the entire world, also a lost decade.