The Coming Muslim Wars And What Might Hopefully Be The Result

Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently said of Muslim countries in the Middle East: "I think we're looking at kind of a 30-year war," arguing that the withdrawal from Iraq created a vacuum that allowed ISIS to rise. The reference to a 30 year war may be intentional. Three months earlier Richard N. Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, compared the coming Muslim wars to the European 30 Years War (1618–1648 AD). He briefly described the European war in the 17th century as "a religious struggle between competing traditions of the faith...fueled by neighboring rulers seeking to defend their interests and increase their influence," where "civil wars and proxy wars become impossible to distinguish." As we know, the loss of life "was devastating." Such a description, he went on to say, "could be a description of today’s Middle East."LINK.

Douglas Murray, writing for The Spectator even earlier in January, also wrote about this parallel:

There are those who think that the region as a whole may be starting to go through something similar to what Europe went through in the early 17th century during the Thirty Years’ War, when Protestant and Catholic states battled it out. This is a conflict which is not only bigger than al-Qa’eda and similar groups, but far bigger than any of us. It is one which will re-align not only the Middle East, but the religion of Islam.

For a primer on the European 30 Years War click here. There are some major differences of course, like the use of modern weaponry and the outside influence of the USA in the Muslim wars, but one similarity is striking. Both European Christians in the 17th century and today's Middle East Muslims were/are extremely intolerant of religious differences to the point of killing each other because of them.

There is hope, if we can survive being draw into a world war, or a nuclear war.

One of the most significant consequences of the Thirty Years War is that it was, essentially, the religious war to end all wars. After this point, religious differences were no longer of primary importance. LINK