Summary
It is a region wracked by religious struggle between competing traditions of the faith.
Conflicts take place within and between states; civil wars and proxy wars become impossible to distinguish.
That could be a description of today’s Middle East.
In the Middle East in 2011, change came after a humiliated Tunisian fruit vendor set himself alight in protest; in a matter of weeks, the region was aflame. In 17th-century Europe, a local religious uprising by Bohemian Protestants against the Catholic Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand II triggered that era’s conflagration.
The result was the Thirty Years’ War, the most violent and destructive episode in European history until the two world wars of the 20th century.
There are obvious differences between the events of 1618-1648 in Europe and those of 2011-2014 in the Middle East.
The 2003 Iraq war was highly consequential, for it exacerbated Sunni-Shiite tensions in one of the region’s most important countries and, as a result, in many of the region’s other divided societies.
Beyond the enormous human suffering and loss of life, the most immediate byproduct of the region’s turmoil is the potential for more severe and frequent terrorism – both in the Middle East and emanating from it.
Read more: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Commentary/2014/Jul-25/265048-prepare-for-the-middle-easts-version-of-the-thirty-years-war.ashx#ixzz38SxYFYve
(The Daily Star :: Lebanon News :: http://www.dailystar.com.lb)
Categories: Africa, Algeria, Arab World, Asia
Again I must say that the writers are always pre-occupied with the ‘sectarian divide’. In Iraq in 2003 for instance whether one was Shia or Sunni was no big deal. Many couples inter-married. The sectarian divide has come up later as a tool for political power. The Iran / Saudi rivalry would be still an Iran / Saudi rivalry even if both were Sunni. (The Afghans do not like the Pakistanis even as both are Sunni). Not sufficiently covered in many articles on the subject are economic classes. In Egypt for instance we could see that mostly the Muslim Brotherhood was supported by the lower classes and opposed by the Middle and Higher (economic) classes. If the population could see economic potential they would not be interested in militant means. (During the cold war in Europe many people said ‘better red than dead’, meaning that due to their economic good condition they did not have any interest in fighting).
Just some thoughts…