Bosnia's Muslims: A fundamental threat?

Anxiety about Bosnian fundamentalism has begun to spread in the West. It may be understandable for Westerners to project onto Bosnia concerns that originally developed in their confrontation with the Middle East. However, as a closer look at Bosnia's Muslims will show, it is also a mistake - with potentially disastrous consequences. In Bosnia, ethnic cleansing has provoked a type of political hysteria among some Bosnian Muslims - but it took the form of secular-nationalist extremism, not religious fundamentalism. The political alternatives facing Bosnian Muslims today are 2 forms of secular nationalism. In one, Bosnia would be a multi-ethnic society in which no single community should dominate. In the other, Bosnian Muslims would predominate. In any case, Islamic fundamentalism, or indeed any variety of political Islam, is not an option in Bosnia. To succeed in the post-Cold War world, the US will have to discriminate among the sundry parties to the world's conflicts, to learn which are really threatening and which are not.