The term "Islamofascist" is much overworked by neo-con hacks to smear any Islamic groups that oppose the US programme for global hegemony. But the unpalatable truth that Barbara Amiel, Christopher Hitchens and other cheerleaders of Pax Americana need to face is that when real Islamo- fascists do turn up, they can expect to receive backing from the country we are meant to believe is so set against them.

Alija Izetbegovic, the former Bosnian leader who died on 19 October, is a case in point. The Austrian politician Jorg Haider provoked ostracism and EU sanctions for his pro-Nazi remarks. Izetbegovic, a man who had not only served in an SS-sponsored organisation in the Second World War but actually recruited for it, received rather different treatment.

For his wartime activities, Izetbegovic was jailed for three years by the Yugoslav authorities. Unfortunately for the Balkan peoples, his extremism surfaced again. In 1970, he published his "Islamic Declaration", in which he argued that "the first and most important conclusion" from the Koran was "the impossibility of connection between Islam and non-Islamic systems". He denounced secularism and the left-leaning Ba'athist Arab states.

The biggest myth about Izetbegovic is that his pan-Islamist, anti-Yugoslav views held popular support among Muslims in Bosnia. As late as 1989, a poll showed that 62.2 per cent of Muslims wanted federal structures strengthened, while just 9.5 per cent wished further autonomy for the republics. Even in elections for the Bosnian presidency in December 1990, Izetbegovic received over a million fewer votes than his pro-Yugoslav rival.

That Izetbegovic was able to come to power in Bosnia and take the republic on its separatist course owes much to the enthusiastic support he received from his sponsors in Washington, who saw the hard-core Islamist as an ally in their strategic objective to break up Yugoslavia. The "Historic Agreement", signed in the summer of 1991 between the moderate Bosniak leader Adil Zulfikarpasic and the Bosnian Serbs, which would have kept Bosnia in Yugoslavia, was, to Washington's delight, rejected by Izetbegovic. So was the EU-sponsored Lisbon Accord of 1992, which provided for the cantonisation of a unified, independent Bosnia - a far poorer option for the republic than that offered a year earlier - but this time only after intervention from the US ambassador, Warren Zimmermann. "If you don't like it, why sign it?" Zimmermann asked Izetbegovic, thus lighting the touch paper for a three-year war in which at least 50,000 people lost their lives. Three years later, at Dayton, Izetbegovic finally signed a peace agreement, but one which, by undermining his goal of a unitary Bosnian authority, offered him less than he would have received at Lisbon.

For Bosnia, like the other breakaway Yugoslav republics but more so, "independence" has proved a chimera. For all the novelties of statehood, Bosnia is in effect little more than a World Bank/IMF/Nato protectorate, with the imperial high representative, Lord (Paddy) Ashdown, able to sack the people's elected representatives at will. Was all this worth the death and suffering of so many people?

"I would sacrifice peace in order to win sovereignty for Bosnia, but for that peace I would not sacrifice sovereignty," Izetbegovic declared in 1991. In the end, he achieved neither.