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.

Mladic and Bin Laden

I’m struck by how many of the world’s most fearsome men have ended their days in isolation, old and enfeebled, frail shells of the powerful commanders they claimed to be in their prime. Video from Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan shows a thin, gray-bearded man wrapped in a blanket, rocking back and forth as he changes the channels on the television. Ratko Mladic, the Serbian war crimes fugitive, was discovered in his cousin’s home, having been chased from the relative luxury in which began his years on the run. He had only $800 on him when he was captured. Doreen Carvajal and Steven Erlanger of the Times write:

Mr. Mladic was paying close attention, with plenty of time to watch television, according to investigators who described him as a “tired old man.” His face carried some of the story of how he had lived, a frail image that startled close friends and the men hunting him. That image was hard to reconcile with the burly, commanding ex-general whose wanted poster hung in the offices of war crimes prosecutors.

The Times reports that Mladic initially attended soccer matches and dined at restaurants, but “his world steadily shrank.” He was plagued by heart attacks and strokes, much as Bin Laden was rumored to suffer from kidney failure. (He was not, however good a punchline it may have made, on dialysis.)

When the similarities between Mladic and Bin Laden first occurred to me, my initial reaction was something to the effect of, “But Mladic is no Bin Laden.” The leader of al Qaeda has achieved such notoriety in the American mindset that he has become a kind of Hitler figure: someone to whom no one else, no matter how evil, should be compared. Despite the right-wing talking heads that like to compare labor unions to Nazis and the health care overhaul to the approach of Hitler’s armies, equating one of today’s small-fry dictators — Assad in Syria, Mubarak in Egypt — seems laughable. How can any of these leaders be compared to a man who systematically exterminated six million Jews?

But Bin Laden is not Hitler. Yes, he looms large in American consciousness, but 3,000 people (more, if you count victims beyond 9/11) are not six million. The attack on the World Trade Center was horrible, but it was not genocide, and the parallels between Bin Laden and Mladic are far greater than those between bin Laden and Hitler. Mladic stands accused of killing 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, and countless more in the multi-year siege of Sarajevo. His crimes are, if anything, greater than Bin Laden’s. But though they are greater in terms of lives lost, to Americans there is hardly a crime greater than that which we feel Bin Laden perpetrated against us. He made us afraid, he changed our reality. He brought terrorism to the U.S. and gave us a taste of what is experienced daily by people in the Middle East. Most of all, he questioned our exceptionalism; that is, the idea that America was the exception to the rule of violence that is unavoidable in many of the world’s countries.

It is perhaps too much to ask for Americans to think rationally, especially after the specter of Bin Laden and al Qaeda was held up as the reason for Afghanistan and Iraq, where so many American soldiers have died. It is perhaps too much to ask that we acknowledge that the capture of Mladic has brought more justice — if justice is counted in number of deaths avenged — than the killing of Bin Laden. Americans, after all, are not asked for much. But though we regard our own wounds as deeper and more painful than those of the Serbian and Bosnian families that Mladic destroyed, we cannot escape the fact that there are tyrants in the world more evil and more powerful than the man behind 9/11.