Part VI: Reformers, Foreign Policy, “Collateral Damage,” and the Iraq War

In Part VI of our debate, we get into the meat of foreign policy issues that help explain the rise of Islamism and terrorism.

SH: Well, we’re near the two-hour mark, so let’s just try to cover a little more of your text.

OA: I want to cover the issues of radicalization and political Islam.

SH: Ok, it’s going to be come up. Even just this next piece. So the paragraph is, “What is right in the book.”

OA: [Begins reading from text] What is right in the book can be attributed solely to Maajid Nawaz. In fact, one can skip over everything Sam Harris says because he is merely repackaging ideas he has articulated many times before. Among the elementary truisms Nawaz points to: addressing the grievances many young Muslims feel, changing the narrative the Islamist demagogues have mastered, injecting a dose of cultural liberalism into conservative societies to induce progress on women’s rights and free speech, raising the low expectations held by too many Americans about supposedly thin-skinned Muslims who cannot take a joke and must be coddled. Well and good, and self-evident enough, except to the most benighted ideologues.

And I hope we can talk about what a strategy for actually inducing that kind of progress looks like. I proposed one earlier in our conversation about supporting the leftist and progressive element in the Middle East and Muslim world that exists, and existed in the form of the Pakistan People’s Party before it was co-opted by the right, it existed in the form of —

SH: — Omer.

OA: Wait, I want to list off some of these people so your listeners don’t think that.

SH: Just do it when we start talking about the text. So you bring up two things in this paragraph that I want to deal with. Again, your framing of this issue strikes me as just false here. The first point is — you seem to be claiming that all of this is so obvious, all the points that Maajid makes are so obvious that they don’t even require saying. It’s as though all Muslims sound exactly like Maajid. I can’t imagine how you can say this.

OA: I can say it because I know Muslim reformers who have been working on the front lines of these issues, in America, in Canada, in Britain, and in the Middle East and South Asia. That’s how.

SH: I’m sure you can point to — I know a few other Muslim reformers, but there’s almost no one who sounds like Maajid. You don’t even sound like Maajid. And that’s why Maajid is such a breath of fresh air, and that’s why he gets so much abuse from his fellow Muslims. If you think that what he’s doing is totally obvious, it’s uncontroversial to say that we need to go from pluralism to secularism to liberalism, as he does in our book, then you have to explain why he gets so much abuse.

OA: A great friend of mine, Ali Eteraz, who is also a writer, was writing against what he calls “Falwell Muslims” in 2007 in a five-part series for The Guardian. He steeped that piece in Islamic history and he offered a way forward that was actually plausible. In fact, it influenced me, about creating and supporting and fostering — or recreating, actually — the Muslim left, which already exists in nascent form in every single country. So these reformers already exist. You said I don’t sound like Maajid Nawaz, I take that, because of my good Canadian accent, as a compliment. I wrote an article after Charlie Hebdo and I said that those cartoons should be republished because no community deserves special treatment. That’s something Maajid and I, and you and I, would agree on.

The reason why Maajid Nawaz is criticized by people like Haroon Moghul, by many others within the Muslim community, why he lacks standing — and by ‘standing’ I mean legitimacy within those communities — is because he’s seen, very often, as lecturing them from the outside. Do you know what someone told me? A conservative Muslim. He didn’t need a lecture from a former jihadist because he had no inclination to become a jihadist. He was just trying to practice his Islam — and this person, and many people like him, don’t take Maajid Nawaz seriously. They don’t read him and they’re not going to listen to him. But they will listen to the local community organizers working every single day within Muslim communities, in mosques and community centers, and have been doing so for the past thirty years, and those who are politically organized in the Middle East and South Asia.

SH: The difference between Maajid and those people, and the reason why Maajid is so much clearer on the points that we need to get clear about — Muslim community needs to get clear about, like free speech and the rights of minorities within the minority — the rights of gays and women and freethinkers and even apostates — the reason why I can count on one hand the people who are as clear as Maajid in the Muslim community on these points, is because they are not practicing the kind of identity politics that people like Murtaza Hussain practice, and the kind of identity politics I certainly read in the background of your piece, and that I hear in the background of what you’re saying.

OA: Where do I practice identity politics? I’m post-identity politics. I’m a liberal.

SH: It’s your whole beef against Maajid as not being sufficiently rooted in the community.

OA: That’s a basic proposition. If you want to change a community, if you want to influence change, you have to be seen as legitimately rooted within that community. Go back to Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, if they were seen as outsiders. This is a fundamental political principle.

SH: But that is also a problem with the state of the community. To see everything through the lens of politics and through the lens of identity politics is a problem, when you’re talking about the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, for instance.

OA: It’s entirely legitimate for Muslims to feel that Maajid Nawaz is not one of them because he is taking money from right-wingers.

SH: Let’s get to that because that’s not true. First of all, it’s not legitimate, because think of Maajid’s story. He was an Islamist, not a jihadist — he was an Islamist, he had a Muslim family which he lost when he lost his Islamism. He had a hijabi wife and a son with her, they’re both estranged from him because of Islamist ideology. He runs an organization that is staffed mostly by Muslims, they also have Muslim families. The idea — later on in the piece you say all he has to do is talk to more Muslims, all he does is talk to Muslims, he’s lived in multiple Muslim countries, he speaks fluent Arabic and Urdu, he’s studied with theologians — to say that he’s not rooted in the community is crazy.

OA: I say he’s not perceived as being rooted in the community.

SH: And he’s not perceived because —

OA: — He’s buddying up to right-wingers. That delegitimizes him. He’s a political reformer, so he should understand the basic equations that determine political success. And look, I agree with you that the minorities within the minority must be protected. However many atheists there are in Saudi Arabia or Egypt — they need to be protected and we must speak out on behalf of them, so that the Muslim right, the “Falwell Muslims,” don’t dominate the narrative. But one thing I don’t hear you speak out about are the Muslims in the majority who have very often been killed and maimed, either by their own dictators whom we have supported, or by our bombs. Stephen Walt, the Harvard professor, did a back-of-the-envelope examination of how many Muslims the United States has bombed and killed. And he came up to 300,000. There were almost a million people who were killed in Iraq. 1,500 civilians in Gaza. [Egyptian President] Sisi has estimated to kill thousands of people. Bashar al-Assad — and here, our inaction is culpable — 800,000 people. I don’t see you criticizing or lamenting the deaths of those people. It makes me wonder, does your heart turn for their lives or not?

SH: First of all, I do lament collateral damage —

OA: You dehumanize it again. “Collateral damage.” These are individuals, Sam. These are people who have been massacred and maimed.

SH: I don’t mean to dehumanize with that phrase. We can talk about that being a problematic phrase, but I’m just referring to the fact that there are people who have been killed in wars, some wars that I think are defensible, some wars I think are not. I view the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan differently. Collateral damage is a huge problem in war, and it has been for a very long time. We won what I think everyone views as a necessary war against Germany in World War Two and the level of collateral damage there was just as horrific as ever happened in human history. And now the Germans are our friends. So if you’re going to look at the bombing of Dresden, and think in retrospect that it was probably indefensible at the time and tactically unnecessary, but let’s say it was tactically necessary —

OA: Our generals would have been in Nuremberg if we lost that war. That was a war crime, as was Hiroshima.

SH: There are reasonable debates on all these points and I think that Hiroshima is more debatable than Dresden. In any case, we waged war against Germany and Japan at a scale that no one could contemplate now and certainly no one could be sanguine about defending ethically. And now, the Germans and the Japanese are our friends. We went into those societies, we didn’t rape and kill everyone and steal all their material wealth and enslave them — no, we went in and rebuilt their societies with them, and now they are our allies. There’s two things to realize about that. One, it reveals something about the importance of our intentions in waging that war. Our intention was not world conquest. We weren’t trying to execute a genocide against Germans and Japanese, and there are really isn’t any moral equivalence to the two sides in that war. When you ask the Germans would have done if they conquered the world or the Japanese, we would have a very different world we would be living in right now. So even the analogy you drew to Nuremberg there was false.

OA: Intentions in foreign policy are actually the most useful and the most irrelevant to analyze an ethical situation. The reason why is because you can have great intentions and kill a million people, and you can have awful intentions — and it doesn’t turn on the weapon. So, yes, World War Two is in some cases not a useful analogy today because all the norms and laws we have developed internationally since then were a response to that brutality, and we don’t want to go back to what it was like, bombing Dresden or dropping a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

SH: There’s no way around the deeper issue, which is to wage any kind of war, even a necessary war, runs the risk of collateral damage.

OA: These numbers are huge, Sam. By the most sophisticated militaries.

SH: Some of that data is highly politicized, and I don’t know what the numbers are in certain cases. For instance, the US is getting blamed in many of those tallies.

OA: The Pentagon numbers are actually conservative. If you look at what other, impartial investigators look at in casualties in the Iraq War, what you call “collateral damage” and just dismiss as if these bodies did not exist.

SH: Again, you’ve just wandered into a totally uncharitable and disingenuous reading of what I said. Collateral damage is a standard phrase that everyone uses on this topic. I’m not diminishing the horror of those who are collaterally damaged. I have written about this at length — I don’t know anyone who has focused how bad, ethically, collateral damage is more than I have.

OA: You exonerate by pointing to intentions and intentions in international relations are irrelevant.

SH: Is it irrelevant — is the difference between performing our own rape of Nanking in Japan, after we’ve militarily subjugated them and doing what in fact we did, which is help them rebuild their societies, is that difference irrelevent?

OA: In terms of foreign policy and international relations, if we hold the highest principle to be human rights — we want to save lives and we don’t want innocent people killed — that turns on consequentialism. This goes back to Thucydides. The intentions are irrelevant because people have, often times, very good intentions and they do horrendous things, or they have awful intentions and they end up doing less awful things.

SH: The difference there is that the intention is the only guide to what they’re going to do next.

OA: Japan had a rape of Nanking that they intended and executed and were able to implement. If you suppose that their intentions were great, and they wanted to save China from the Communist Party, they wanted to reclaim China, they had very benign intentions, the way the colonial and imperialist powers did, and yet more people were raped than would have been had they had awful intentions, then the ethics of that leads to an absurd conclusion. This was the point of contention between you and Noam Chomsky, again, I have some disagreements with him post-9/11 — this is why the morality of an action or the ethics of an action cannot turn on its intentions, because A) every Western policymaker claims to have great intentions, and B) if our highest principle is saving lives and not having innocent people killed, that’s consequentialism, and that turns on how many people have actually died.

SH: I’ve written at great length about consequentialism, I’ve written an entire book putting forward my version of consequentialism. You don’t have to stop your analysis of consequences at body count, and in fact, if you do just stop at body count, you run into moral monstrosities.

OA: It’s one place, since we’re talking about “collateral damage.”

SH: Intention matters for a variety of reasons, and as you know, I didn’t actually get to have a conversation with Chomsky on this point. I was simply just trying to have one, and who knows, it could have gone as sideways as this one, it very likely would have. But the issue with intention, if nothing else, is knowing what someone was attempting to do and why they were attempting to do it, is a very good guide for the kinds of things they’ll attempt to do in the future. When you understand what somebody wants, how they want the world to be, then you know what it will be like to collaborate with them in the future. You know whether they’re going to be a good neighbor. If you know your neighbor is a cannibal, and he’s just coming over for dinner every night in the hopes to eat you when you’re not looking, his intentions are highly relevant to know. And it’s different if it’s someone who has your best interests at heart. Of course, this is an obvious and pedantic and unimportant point that it is possible with the best of intentions to create huge harms. Yes, obviously, that is something which if you have the best of intentions, you really care about. If I want to help my daughter and I end up cutting her head off, no one is going to more concerned about the disparity between my intention and the results in the world that I am.

OA: It would be gross negligence. What’s the distinction between an intentional war crime and a war crime that’s grossly negligent? You’re a great defender of the Israeli state, I think, of course, that Israel has a right to exist, but, independent analyses of the 2014 Gaza War, showed that they [the IDF] used less discriminate weapons than they could have and they bombed many civilian centers —

SH: This is something we could talk about with an infinite amount of time, I want to get back to the text.

OA: The broader point is that to lament the minorities within minorities and not all these other Muslims is why you’re accused of dehumanizing Muslim lives. I haven’t heard you say it in print at all, actually.

SH: What haven’t I said in print?

OA: Lamenting the immense loss of life caused by Western foreign policy and the support for local dictators. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people now.

SH: We have to talk about specific situations. There are specific dictators in specific moments where the alternative to them is either just total chaos or jihadist lunacy.

OA: That’s bullshit. I know you’re thinking about Sisi and Assad — the fact is that the democratic opposition has not had the opportunity to organize and engage in a political space.

SH: There may be cases where that’s the case.

OA: Those dictators actually worsen the Islamist problem, and they actually confirm the Islamist narrative, and they push the Islamists underground and the Islamists have the ability to organize and say, “Look, we’re anti-establishment, we’re anti-status quo, this person in power is an infidel, he’s supported by the West.”

SH: Let’s just take a moment to drill down on this because one of the main criticisms of the war in Iraq, which I did not support, which I always just said, “I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, we’ll know in the end based on consequentialist analysis” but it looks like a dangerous distraction from the war in Afghanistan. That has always been — at the time, when people were supporting it and people were against it, I didn’t know what I thought about the war in Iraq. But the people who looked at it then and certainly the people who look at it now and say we are culpable for all the death and destruction caused by our misadventure there, they say this either explicitly or implicitly claiming, that we should have left the dictator in place. We should have left Saddam Hussein in power because deposing him just pulled the lid on all the sectarian hatred that we should have known was there — we are morally culpable for our ignorance and our negligence, and we pulled the lid off of this and now we have ISIS. So we made ISIS.

OA: That’s very simplistic and I don’t agree with that.

SH: Well many people believe this but in any case, then I’ll actually ask you what you believe here. Should we just have left Saddam Hussein in power?

OA: Of course not. I know the analogy is made to Hitler but he was actually the closest despot to Hitler in terms of his totalitarianism. This is someone who would execute people and then send a bill to the families for the bullets. This is incomprehensible evil. And so we should have taken him out at some point. But the war with Saddam Hussein was postponed in 1991. So Saddam Hussein tries to make Kuwait a province of Iraq, he is repelled, legitimately — and many progressives at the time opposed that, in fact, I think even Hitchens did according to anti-imperialist logic, and they were wrong there — and what happens afterwards is there is an organic uprising, with Shia Muslims, and Kurds, and Sunni Muslims disaffected from the regime, and they’re looking around thinking they’re going to get support from the United States and the U.S. is completely silent. Saddam Hussein conducts a massacre, mass-murdering Shia and the Kurds.

SH: So we should have gone in then and supported the Kurds?

OA: Yes. It was a deliberate policy position taken by Colin Powell and the [first] Bush Administration that there was not going to be regime change even though the people were demanding it.

SH: But how are you just not saying that we should have pulled the lid off of all the sectarian chaos a decade or more earlier?

OA: Because the sectarian chaos is not inherent in the people. What happens in 2003 — what I would have done in 2003, right before the Iraq War is launched — the United Nations passes resolution, unanimously supported, by Russia and China as well, demanding that Saddam Hussein reveal his weapons program. Now, had we done this through international law and actually gone to the U.N. again, and were receptive to global public opinion, we could have had the world on our side. But the sectarian hatred is not inherent — it’s not like we just pulled it off. What happens is that the U.S. allows all kinds of looting and massacres to occur, there weren’t enough troops there, Mr. Bremer de-Baathified the country, and put 100,000 people with guns in their hands out of work, and then a gangster — a religious gangster — named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of ISIS, goes in and begins blowing up UN buildings and mosques. That’s how the sectarian war begins. It’s not because of the U.S. war. It’s not because the sectarian hatreds were inherent. The people on the left, or anyone who says, “We went into Iraq, therefore there is sectarian hatred there,” the question you ask them is, “Do you think that sectarian hatred is inherent in the Iraqi and Arab people?” Because that’s the conclusion you ultimately have to agree with and I don’t buy that.

SH: It’s inherent in the 1,400 year-old schism between Shia and Sunni, and it’s spread the world over. So you have to explain why Sunnis blow up Shia mosques in Pakistan or Ahmadi mosques in Pakistan.

OA: Not Sunni but a particular jihadist organization — the Pakistani Taliban because they want to stoke sectarian tensions. Where in the Qur’an does it say Sunni or Shia? Again, a political dispute.

SH: It’s not a political dispute it’s a difference of theology.

OA: What’s the difference in theology? Of who should rule — that’s politics.

SH: It’s a different theological reading of history and succession after the prophet.

OA: Or a different political reading.

SH: The veneration of Imams. Yes, these are tiny differences in theology but they are differences that matter.

OA: The Sunni-Shia dispute begins after the death after the death of the fourth Caliph and there’s a civil war that takes place.

SH: It’s politics that’s now religiously enshrined. Someone who is born a Shia, who identifies only as a Shia, or someone, more reasonably, is born a Sunni and views Shia as apostates, that is a religious conception of what you are calling politics.

OA: The is a sleight of hand, because you’ve broadened what counts as religion.

SH: The only difference between these people is religion.

OA: We can talk about texts but politics is what matters.

SH: Religious tribalism is not ordinary politics.

OA: Religious tribalism is probably engrained in us but it’s politically manifested.

SH: If you think that your political difference with someone matters not just for this world and not for any terrestrial purpose for which you could be devoted but for eternity — it will spell the difference between whether you and your kids could get into paradise — that is religion. That’s not politics.

OA: That’s not grounded in the text.

SH: Paradise isn’t?

OA: The bombing of mosques.

SH: The difference between being an apostate and not, the legitimacy of waging jihad, the promise of martyrdom — that’s not grounded in the text? That’s not religious?

OA: Let’s talk about all those things, but the example that you used — which you’ve now run away from, is the Sunni bombing of a Shiite mosque —

SH: I’m not running away from it.

OA: Where was the Sunni-Shia war in 1920? Where was it? If it’s all inherent in the text? Where were the bombings of mosques by Sunnis and Shiites in 1920? Where was it? This comes about for specific political reasons that begin in 1979.

SH: You’re saying that the schism between Sunni and Shia, the world over, began in 1979?

OA: I’m saying that the bombing and killing by Sunnis of Shia and by Shia of Sunnis begins in 1979 for a number of political reasons.

SH: Well, there were no bombs if you back in history.

OA: Prior to this, yes, the schism exists, but they live next to each other because their only disagreement is — a little bit on how they pray, depending on the sect, the principles of the faith, five or six pillars, and a politically different reading of history that takes place after the Prophet’s death and after the deaths of the Caliphs. So this is a political interpretation. But the killing, the massacre, the bombing — which I condemn, and which you condemn — begins in 1979 for a number of reasons, because of the Iranian revolution, because of Saudi.

SH: You’re saying that there has been no blood spilled between Sunni and Shia?

OA: I did not say that, Sam.

SH: You’re saying that it started in 1979.

OA: There’s always wars between brothers in every single religion, and there is this thing called the narcissism of small differences and there have been tensions. I’m saying that the modern incarnation of the Sunni-Shia war that we’ve seen, with the Saudis executing the Sheikh [Nimr] and fifty people and Sunnis blowing up mosques, Zarqawi and ISIS blowing up mosques, ISIS executing Shia, that begins in 1979 for specific political reasons that apparently you do not want to discuss. It’s not theology there.

SH: To say that “modern” anything does not begin until recently is a tautology. To say that there were no bombings —

OA: There were no mass killings. There was no organized, pre-meditated, murder of Shias before. Yes, there may have been isolated pogroms that happened, but there’s nothing like we’ve seen now. For 1,400 years, largely, Muslims lived in peace, with each other, and very often, with Jews and with Christians.

SH: We’re going into a variant reading of history here, which you are —

OA: Do you want me to quote you Bernard Lewis on this? He said that it was much better for Christians and Jews to live under Islamdom than it was for non-Christians in Christendom.

SH: And that says absolutely nothing good about Islam and just reminds us that how terrible Christianity was in the 14th century.

OA: Well, you have to historicize your comparisons, you can’t compare it to the twenty-first century. The nation-state is born in 1648.

SH: I am the first to admit how horrible medieval Christianity was. You’re drawing the wrong conclusion from that. You’re saying that life for Christians and Jews was fine in the Muslim world, which it wasn’t and never was —

OA: — You have to contextualize it. What’s your definition of “fine”? Is it twenty-first century Switzerland? Then of course not. But if we’re talking about the entire world that existed outside of the Muslim world at that point, Islamic civilization, which both Hitchens and Bernard Lewis have praised for its diversity and openness, then that’s the comparison you need to be making. Otherwise it’s ahistorical and unfair to say, “Oh, well, Switzerland is nice now.”

SH: Listen. It was possible in the fifth century BC to come up with a more benign and more tolerant and more open-minded view of the universe than the Abrahamic tradition ever managed, right. There were Greek philosophers and there were Buddhists and there were Jains and there were people in other traditions, who had ethics, that were far more modern than anything Christianity, Judaism, or Islam managed for a thousand years. So don’t give me this story about it being ahistorical. It’s possible for human beings to realize they don’t want to keep slaves, or don’t want their women to live in bags, or perform clitorectomies on their daughters, or anything else we rightly deplore now, it was possible to realize that two thousand years ago, and some people managed that.

OA: The civilizations that existed, you have to compare them A) against each other, and B) you can compare them to the modern conception of rights, for example. The Sharia as it was practiced in the 9th and 10th century, gave women property rights, it gave women the right to divorce, it gave women the right to inherit wealth, and again, I’m no fan of these regimes and I’m trying to — I don’t want to say “educate you” but at least provide some facts — women were fighting on the front lines of wars that Muslim armies had, and that’s something ISIS won’t even allow today. The Ottoman Empire banned slavery in 1839. The United States did not do that until a few years later. So, look, we have to contextualize it within the history. This is the debate that I want to have. Because if it’s all in the text and the text is dead and it preaches terrorism and there’s a connection between beliefs and consequences as you say, then why wasn’t it happening before.

SH: It was happening before but it was happening in the context of less technology. There’s only so many people you can kill with swords and spears. Yes, bomb-making technology changes the game and nuclear bombs change the game, dirty bombs even, change the game. And this is what I’m worried about.

OA: The massacres are not happening.

SH: Listen, there are massacres of Jews going back throughout Muslim and Christian history. At no point was it a good scenario to be a Jew living in the Muslim world or living under Christendom.

OA: Although you would recognize that were doctors and philosophers and polymaths who were Jewish and played very central roles in Islamic empires?

SH: And we can probably number them on one hand.

OA: I don’t know about that.

SH: We can talk about the golden age of Islam if you insist but I just want to go back to a point you made about my putative misunderstanding of the facts on the ground in a country like Iraq. Now, obviously, I’m aware that not every Iraqi is or was a jihadist. When I’m talking about the sectarian hatred between Sunni and Shia, I’m not saying that every Sunni or every Shiite hated his co-religionist. I’m well aware that these communities inter-married. I’m well aware that there are millions of Muslims, even in these contexts, who just want to live normal lives and are not, by any definition, highly energized religious sectarians eager to fight an internecine civil war. So When I talk about pulling the lid off of this, I’m not talking about 100% of Iraqis based on their religious differences. But there’s enough of a commitment to that we are getting blamed for not having foreseen it. To rewind the tape where we first started to talk about dictators, it’s not a crazy position to say or to wonder or to ask the question, “Well, is this society just too divided along religious lines, and is it too lacking in the kinds of institutions that you need in order to have a viable democracy and a commitment to civil society, for us to just depose the dictator, no matter how bad the dictator is?” And that’s a question we may know only in retrospect but again, it’s one of the main reasons why people thing we were completely wrong, morally, and remain culpable for the resulting devastation for going into Iraq in the first place.

OA: Well, going into a country and doing it negligently and not having enough troops and completely de-Baathifying the army and basically creating the space for a terrorist group, yes we are culpable for that. Very much so.

SH: I would argue that all those failures you just listed were largely, if not entirely, the result of our not understanding the level of religious sectarianism. The risk of civil war.

OA: It’s our not understanding how to do regime change. You didn’t just take the lid off something that was brewing for 1,400 years. That’s not how it happened. How it happened was that armed men were worried about their lack of protection, organized and no longer had a job —

SH: They were worried about their lack of protection because of the sectarian threat. Do you think if that Iraq was 100% Shia or 100% Sunni that Iraq would have the same result after we ineptly deposed Saddam Hussein?

OA: I don’t know, maybe there would be different sects.

SH: Don’t invent different sects, I’m talking about 100% Sunni, or 100% Shia, a single sect.

OA: I think at that point, if Iraq was 100% Sunni or Shia, there would be ideological warfare, if all the other assumptions hold — there is not a functioning government, any kind of looting, all those assumptions hold, then you’re going to see ideological warfare, it’s been done before. You think that sectarian hatreds are inherent and you want to support dictators because what comes afterwards might be worse.

SH: You’re spinning this the wrong way. Inherent to what? It’s inherent to the definition —

OA: — Inherent to the society.

SH: It’s inherent to the two people for whom their religious tribalism is the most important political variable of their lives, if you get rid of the tribalism, it’s not inherent. These are ideas.

OA: So it’s politics then — we’re in the realm of politics and not theology as you earlier thought.

SH: No, we’re talking about religious politics. I will grant you that the theological differences between Sunni and Shia are minuscule, but the totality of their political difference is their religious identity. And the religious importance they see in it. We’re talking about eternity here. We’re talking about paradise.

OA: We’re talking about power.

SH: There is a Sunni who is going to get up tomorrow and decide to blow up a Shia or Ahmadi mosque in Pakistan and he’s going to see no benefit from this behavior in this life. There’s nothing good, politically, that’s going to come to him or his family.

OA: Maybe not in Pakistan now because the military there is taking a very strong stance against this suicide terrorism, but look, I take your point, that there’s a religious element to suicide bombing that they think is legitimate. I don’t think is. But I think the problem with the Sunni-Shia conflict, and just reducing it to that, is that you exclude other kinds of analyses. For example, Shias were living peacefully in Pakistan for most of its history, again up until after the Afghanistan war, and then you have a new Pakistani version of the Taliban that begins blowing up Shia mosques. The founder of the country was a Shia. Some of its intellectual and political elite were Shia. It’s the same thing in many other countries. In Lebanon, for example, they fought a civil war over who was going to control the government. Is it going to be a Christian who’s going to control the Lebanese government or is it going to be a Sunni or is it going to be a Shiite? Eventually they came to an agreement. Now it’s the Shia militants and the ISIS folks who are threatening them. In other countries as well. In Iran, which you would say is an Islamist regime and I would agree with you, and you would think that they’re trying to put all the Jews to death, there are 8,000 Jews living in Iran. There’s a seat reserved for them in the Parliament. They are very proud of their Persian-Jewish identity. It’s not just sectarianism.