Word: bosnia
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...IRAQ The Bush Administration used to think that nation building was beneath it; now it's clear that the creation of a civil society is crucial to stability in Iraq. That happens to be a European speciality. In Slovakia, Bosnia and the Caucasus, the E.U. has created civil, judicial and political institutions, from agricultural advice bureaus to customs inspectors. Can it work in Iraq? Germany and France, among others, have now promised to forgive some of the country's debt, and the E.U. is launching a training program for some 800 top Iraqi law-enforcement and justice officials...
...BALKANS The former Yugoslavia is one place where E.U. power is starting to come into its own. It took American resolve to rout the Serbs in Bosnia in 1995, and American planes to bomb them out of Kosovo in 1999, but NATO's formerly 60,000-strong security force in Bosnia is long gone. In its place is a peacekeeping operation of 7,000 European troops under E.U. control. "The Balkans are divided into two groups: those who will become E.U. members soon and those who won't," says Gerald Knaus, head of the European Stability Initiative, a Berlin think...
...constructive impact than the U.S. Yet the E.U.'s transformative power is often confused with weakness. The E.U. doesn't change countries by threatening to invade them. Its biggest threat is not intervention but withdrawal of the hand of friendship and especially the prospect of membership. For countries like Bosnia, Turkey and Ukraine, the only thing worse than having to deal with the Brussels bureaucracy is not getting to deal with it at all. E.U. membership is such a powerful lure that countries will revamp their legal, judicial and political systems just to join...
...That is not to pretend that the U.S. undertook Iraq for reasons of pure humanitarianism-as America undertook the rescue of other Muslim peoples (with varying success) in Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo. We would never have invaded Iraq to depose Saddam without 9/11. After 9/11, we finally understood that helping build decent, representative, tolerant societies in the Middle East is ultimately the only way to prevent endless generations of young Arab men from finding fulfillment by crashing airplanes into buildings filled with infidels. Europe has a similar interest, having suffered, with the train bombings in Madrid, the kind of fanatic...
...become and the presidency he guides as anything I've heard in four years. His father tried to shirk the caricature that all he cared about was foreign policy. The son, who came to office, probably figuring he'd fix schools, cut taxes, and get the hell out of Bosnia has found his passion in world affairs, arguably more so than his U.N. Ambassador dad. All the energy was in the back half of the speech-the foreign policy section-and not just because of the electric moment of a fallen soldier's mother hugging a first-time Iraqi voter...