The murderous rift between Sunni and Shia in the Muslim world is indicative of the psychology of our enemy. Sunni consider Shia to be worse than Jews, let alone pigs. Both sides consider the other to be an unforgivable heresy that must be, to coin a phrase, wiped from the face of the Earth. They are fighting about events that occurred over a thousand years ago, and doctrinal differences on the order of those between Southern Baptists and Northern Baptists. These disagreements are widely considered to be justification for murder. This mentality is incomprehensible to the Western mind, but it is a fact of life in Arabia and Persia.
The West continually makes the universal human error of assuming that the person we are talking to is more or less like us. We assume, in other words, that ultimately they are reasonable people who want the same things we all want, peace, prosperity, freedom, opportunity. We assume that the daily exhortations to eliminate the Jews and infidels and “moderate Muslims” are just empty rhetoric. They can’t really mean it. Millions of people couldn’t possibly be that crazy. But, if we need proof, we need only look at the thousand year Shia-Sunni global civil war.
Savages is a word you’re not supposed to use these days, dehumanizing the enemy and all. The word may have disappeared, but its meanings linger on, waiting to get their word back. One of those meanings is “primitive; uncivilized”. It is popular in civilized circles to exalt the primitive and to equate it with civilization. From “Dances with Wolves” Indians to “Lawrence of Arabia” Arabs, tribal people are portrayed as noble members of sophisticated cultures every bit as valid as any other. The anthropologist Lawrence H. Keeley, in his book War Before Civilization, points out that two billion war deaths would have occurred in the 20th century if modern societies suffered the same casualty rate as primitive peoples. He calculates that two-thirds of them were at war continuously, typically losing half of a percent of their population to war each year.
This is not a clash of civilizations. This is a clash between civilization and barbarism. In the civilized, post-tribal world, war has all but died out since the fall of the Soviet Union. But war continues to rage in the areas of the world that are still cursed with tribalism. Now modern communications and weapons technology and the price of oil has given them the ability to strike us, and the inability of so many civilized people in the U.S. and Europe to confront the reality of savagery is crippling our ability to respond. So far we are officially unable to even name our enemy, thus “The Global War on Terror”. I won’t quibble about what word to substitute for “terror”. I would be happy with “Islamofascism” or “Jihadism” or “Iran”.