Back in 1999, the last time we had a President Clinton, the United States and NATO intervened in Kosovo to prevent the slaughter of civilians in yet another of the brutal civil wars that resulted from the dissolution of what used to be Yugoslavia. The intervention was vigorous enough to draw criticism from, among other organizations, Amnesty International, but it had the desired effect. The slaughter was of Kosovo's ethnic Albanians, most of whom were Muslims, a community that, until all hell broke loose, generally lived in harmony with its Christian neighbors.

I mention all this because, as The New York Times reports, our great good friends, the Saudis, and their affiliated statelets around the Persian Gulf, are doing their best to start the bloodletting all over again.

The mosque is one of scores built here with Saudi government money and blamed for spreading Wahhabism—the conservative ideology dominant in Saudi Arabia—in the 17 years since an American-led intervention wrested tiny Kosovo from Serbian oppression. Since then—much of that time under the watch of American officials—Saudi money and influence have transformed this once-tolerant Muslim society at the hem of Europe into a font of Islamic extremism and a pipeline for jihadists. Kosovo now finds itself, like the rest of Europe, fending off the threat of radical Islam. Over the last two years, the police have identified 314 Kosovars—including two suicide bombers, 44 women and 28 children—who have gone abroad to join the Islamic State, the highest number per capita in Europe. They were radicalized and recruited, Kosovo investigators say, by a corps of extremist clerics and secretive associations funded by Saudi Arabia and other conservative Arab gulf states using an obscure, labyrinthine network of donations from charities, private individuals and government ministries.

Absent western intervention, Kosovo wouldn't exist today. That doesn't matter to the purveyors of hate and death. If someone can tell me what benefits—besides cheap oil and the feeling that it can always get worse—the world gains from the continued existence of the governments in the Gulf states, I'd be keen to know.

Any influence over them that might come from us arming these governments is clearly nil. They are authoritarian theocracies, bribing murderers to kill people all around the world so they won't kill anyone back home. These countries are a blight, and their rulers, largely plutocratic criminals. These are our allies in the fight against terror.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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