Two topics occupied my thoughts on the first anniversary of September 11.

First, after the passage of a year, the U.S. has yet to receive even the slightest serious accounting from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for the presence of 15 Saudis out of the 19 hijackers. We are told that Crown Prince Abdullah sent a letter to President Bush expressing his dismay at the involvement of his subjects in the horror inflicted on our country. But Princes Sultan and Nayef remained silent — the defense minister who enriched himself on U.S. military deals and the interior minister considered by rank-and-file Muslims to be even worse than bin Laden. King Fahd also had no words to offer, perhaps because he is a vegetable.

The second matter on my mind comes from the Kosovar Albanian journalist Blerim Shala, writing in the Prishtina daily Zeri. Blerim, a friend of mine, pointed out something noble and admirable that has been ignored by American commentators on 9/11: Before the passengers on United Flight 93 rebelled and brought down the hijacked airliner, they did something the world sees as totally American — they took a vote. Blerim wrote, "Even in the toughest moment of their lives, these ordinary American citizens didn't lose their will to respect democratic procedure. In this way, they confronted those who, against any law and any religious and moral norm, killed civilians."

But I have something to confess. Blerim's comments meant a great deal to me, because even a year after September 11, I remain obsessed with my involvement in the Balkans, beginning 15 years ago. In 1987, I published an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle arguing that Yugoslavia was threatened with collapse and war. At the time, Yugoslavia was considered an island of stability, and my views were met with jeers. I was labeled an ignoramus and patronizingly informed that Yugoslavia had resolved its ethnic problems, and that its only challenge was represented by gross inflation. I was repeatedly told that Slobodan Milosevic was a worthy reformer, a Yugoslav Gorbachev.

Well, I turned out to be right, and my critics of that time turned out to be wrong. Little has changed since then; in the next few weeks Doubleday will publish my new book, The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud From Tradition to Terror. Once again, I have argued an unfamiliar and controversial thesis — that Islamic extremist terrorism mainly reflects the influence of Wahhabism, the official sect in Saudi Arabia. There are striking similarities between Saudi Arabia and the former Yugoslavia, and they are not limited to the parallel inconvenience, for the American media and policy class, of predicting deep crises within them. Of course, as with Belgrade in 1990, there are some who today describe Riyadh as a keystone of stability. I have again been told that a dissolving, failed nation-state has overcome its communal and other internal divisions, and that Saudi Arabia's only problems are economic. I don't buy it now, just as I didn't buy it 15 years ago when the subject was Yugoslavia.

Even more strangely, some of the same windbags and wiseacres who leapt to deny the existence of a serious crisis in Yugoslavia now wish to divert U.S. attention from Saudi reality — and to halt U.S. pressure on Iraq. Lawrence Eagleburger and Brent Scowcroft, for example, both belonged to the "Belgrade mafia" of former U.S. diplomats in Yugoslavia, who spoke Serbian and loved talking turkey with Slobo. Now they play the same role with Saddam; it didn't matter to them if Slobo slaughtered a million Bosnians and it doesn't matter to them if the Butcher of Baghdad wipes out a million Kurds or Shi'a Muslims. And of course, the "Slobophile Heil" corner of the sewer, inhabited by lowlifes ranging from the Mickey Maoists of the International Action Center to neofascists a la Justin Raimondo, are still cheering for Slobo and Saddam alike.

The most disreputable Jew-baiters among these repellent rodents have assailed David Horowitz, Ronald Radosh, and myself as ex-leftists who have supposedly become warmongers. But these parasites seem not to notice the logical disconnect: we were leftists decades ago, and have made up for our errors by fighting against dictatorships. Our "critics" are in bed with the skank left now, and actively defend dictatorships. If Raimondo — who not long ago expressed his regret that Japan lost the second world war — is ready to die for anyone, it's for Slobo and Saddam, alongside the "white separatist" trash and the idolaters of Kim Il-sung. Welcome to the show: the Hitler-Stalin Pact, 60 years after. As the French surrealist poet Benjamin Péret reminded us in that context: dried blood turns from red to brown, the color of feces.

I can't disagree with people who say the U.S. should not send our sons and daughters to die in distant places. However, I can treat as morons people who don't notice a couple of obvious facts. First, Saddam should be removed, and if you can't see that by now, there is nothing I or anyone else can say that will convince you. Of course he isn't a direct threat to the U.S., but neither were the Germans in 1941 or the North Koreans in 1950 or the Serbs in 1999. Second, if there is a lesson from Kosovo, as well as from Afghanistan 2001, it is that we can disrupt and overcome enemy regimes without committing any more of our own people than a few extremely brave target spotters and other infiltrators. Slobo had a great deal more support from the Serbs in 1999 than Saddam has from the Iraqis today, yet less than three months of bombing forced the Serb bandit to capitulate.

In addition, while I make no claims to being a military expert, it should be clear to almost anybody that as the 20th century came to an end, a trend visible beginning a hundred years before was fulfilled. That was the replacement of general wars and set-piece combat with "civil" wars, insurgencies, and comparable "low-intensity" conflicts. Macedonia 1893-1913, the Japanese invasions of China, Spain 1936-39, Korea, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Yugoslavia; the pattern is unmistakable. In such crises, mammoth, unwieldy, military forces dispatched from the power centers may be replaced (and sometimes, but not always, defeated) by local, even improvised forces. The Kosovo Liberation Army did the ground fighting in Kosovo, such as it was. An Iraq Liberation Front, including Kurds and Shi'as, can do the ground fighting in Iraq as well. This seems about as commonsensical as anything could be.

There is another, deeper resemblance between the situation in ex-Yugoslavia and the world confrontation that erupted a year ago. Milosevic sent his minions to devastate Sarajevo for exactly the same reason the ultra-Wahhabi wing of the Saudi ruling class subsidizes bin Laden: to support a shaky tyranny. Slobo exported the overeducated, unenterprising "lumpen intelligentsia" of Serbia to Croatia and Bosnia, as genocidal killers, then incited them to a repeat performance in Kosovo. The Saudis have similarly exported their overeducated and unenterprising "lumpen intelligentsia" to various battlefields, some of which they created, as in Somalia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and the Philippines. Here is an exact parallel with the Spanish civil war of 1936-39: the heroic Bosnian Muslims and Albanians fighting Serbian imperialism, and the Chechens defending themselves against the Russians, were threatened from their rearguard by Wahhabi terrorists seeking to capture and exploit their struggles. It was as if the Saudis had read Homage to Catalonia and decided to deliberately imitate the Stalinist betrayal of the Spanish Republic. Many Muslims believe that in the Chechen case, Saudi agents directly collaborated with the Russians.

Thus, in predicting the future of Saudi Arabia, ex-Yugoslavia may be, surprisingly enough, the most useful parallel, and much more appropriate than, for example, Iran. When the Iranians opted for rigid Islamic rule in 1978, it was a novelty, which they had never experienced, supported by a charismatic leader. By contrast, Saudi subjects have suffered under Wahhabism for 75 years, and are quite sick of it. More important, like Yugoslavia, Saudi Arabia is a forcibly-assembled attempt at a nation-state, in which one region exercises total control over others, which boil with resentments. The Serbian monarchists absorbed Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Montenegro in 1919, creating a "nation" in which the backward Serbs monopolized control of the all-important tax function, the state bureaucracy, the police, and the army. Five years later, Ibn Sa'ud and his Wahhabis, originating in the backward province of Najd, seized the Kingdom of Hejaz (site of Mecca and Medina), and with the conquered Eastern Province, tried to fabricate a nation. In the Saudi dominion, Najdis, like their Serbian counterparts, monopolize the tax function, the state bureaucracy, the police, and the army (only the Saudi National Guard under Abdullah, who is neither Najdi nor Wahhabi, escapes their grip).

Like Croatia, which yearned to reestablish its state tradition, and which suffered as a Catholic nation under the domination of the Orthodox Serbs, Hejaz looks back to its brief era of independence, and is an Ashari Muslim (non-Wahhabi) territory under Wahhabi rule. Like Bosnia-Hercegovina, whose Muslims could never be assimilated by the Orthodox Serbs, the Shi'a majority in the oil-rich Eastern Province will never surrender to Wahhabi religious and cultural aggression. And like Kosovo, whose Albanian majority never saw itself belonging to a "state of South Slavs," i.e. Yugoslavia, the Shi'a Muslims of Najran in the southern region of Saudi Arabia, which the Saudis ripped off from Yemen, feel closer to their brethren across the border.

Few things change in this world. In 1986 Nicaraguans told me, "We are living under a Cuban military occupation." In 1991, Croats and Albanians said, "We have to contend with a Serbian occupation regime." In 2002, Saudi dissidents who meet with me say, "We are under military occupation by the Najdis."

Serbs, for their part, don't learn very well. The BBC reported on September 10 that the U.S. has intervened with Bosnian authorities, demanding that a military enterprise in the Bosnian Serb zone cease assisting Saddam Hussein. "It is claimed the company has been supplying military advice and technical know-how to the Iraqi regime," according to the British service. Not long ago, U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control John Bolton disclosed that Serbia continues to assist Libya in its missile development program. On 9/11, Serbs in Belgrade and in the Bosnian Serb zone cheered with the worst of the Gaza garbage, and graffiti appeared rhyming "bin Laden" with srpski mladin, a Serbian youth.

But if Serbs don't change, neither do Albanians, thank God. On September 11, the Kosovo Albanian daily Koha Ditore printed a letter from Michael McClellan, Public Affairs Officer at the U.S. Diplomatic Office in Prishtina, the Kosovo capital. Mr. McClellan recalled how, "Within hours of the [events of September 11], people began coming to Dragodan and standing outside our gates, lighting candles and praying for the victims of terror. To this day, I cannot walk by that place where the wax of countless candles still sticks to the concrete wall, where the smoke of hundreds of burning tributes left its mark, without remembering that amazing night when we Americans first came to realize how strongly the people of Kosovo were standing with us… While we had many heroes in America on September 11, you also had your heroes here. Many Kosovars wanted to give blood for the injured people, a gesture that could not be implemented, but was appreciated so much by all of us. Hundreds of TMK members [ex-KLA] volunteered to go to Afghanistan to help coalition forces in fighting terror. Again, we were unable to take advantage of the offer, but it was well received for its sincerity and sense of sacrifice. The Islamic Community of Kosovo spoke up strongly and forcefully against terrorism and the attacks, condemning it as un-Islamic and against the true teachings of the faith. For me, such acts are heroic and I will never forget the sentiments and courage that were behind them."

My Saudi story — the investigation of Wahhabism presented in my new book — also began in the Balkans, 12 years ago, when I first learned about Bosnian Muslim unease with Saudi "assistance." Orwell did not have to go to Moscow to find out about Stalinism; he learned about it in the streets of Barcelona. Similarly, I did not have to go to Riyadh to understand Wahhabism, having encountered its agents in the streets of Sarajevo, Prishtina, and the towns of Macedonia, Albania, and Montenegro. Nor did I borrow the concept of "Islamofascism," which is at the center of my book, from Christopher Hitchens; he got it from me (and let me point out that he has written a lovely blurb for my book, as readers will see.)

There is a Balkan connection to the Saudi crisis and 9/11 just as there was a historical link between the tragedy of the Spanish civil war and the antifascist cause in World War II. H.E. Mustafa efendija Ceric, reis-ul-ulema or leader of the Bosnian Muslim clerics may have put it best, when he inaugurated a monument at Srebrenica earlier this year: "We pray for sorrow to become hope, for revenge to become justice, and for mothers' tears to become a reminder so that Srebrenica and New York will never happen again to anyone, anywhere."