An Islamic Civil War?
I’ve seen this sort of talk quite a bit, and I don’t understand it. Is Iraq engaged in a Civil War? Perhaps. Is the Middle East? Of course not. Time magazine goes so far as to ask on its latest cover what is driving the Civil War in the Middle East.
Correct me wrong, but the last time I checked there is no Middle East society. It is not a country or a nation, it is a loosely defined region. How foolish would I look if I called the Counter-Reformation a Civil War? Start talking about the War of the Rose and you have a case, but that was an internal conflict that played out as a result of a larger conflagration, and the same is true of Iraq and the Middle East.
The truth of the matter is that this sort of dialogue is just more of the same screwy orientalism that isolates (at least intellectually) and quantifies Islam in ways that legitimate the current “War on Terror,” and it’s numerous tertiary endeavours in the Middle East.
Agreed. It’s crazy.
It just shows what sort of assumptions underlie a lot of this so-called journalism. There’s this idea that the Middle East is a monolith full of people who understand only war and violence. Seriously - people believe this!
Can you imagine calling the softwood lumber thing a North American civil war?
Comment by Red Jenny — February 27, 2007 @ 11:05 am