Finding The Right Language To Define Today's Wars And Conflicts

We Are NOT At War -- Psychology Today

There is no name for the current situation we are in.

Contrary to what you hear on the news, we are currently not at war. But then again, there is no other way to describe the current situation of conflict. There are no names that we can use for it, because the situation had never existed in the history of human civilization.

Since the dawn of civilization, which roughly coincides with the emergence of the first states (known as the pristine states) in Mesopotamia, Indus Valley, Egypt and China roughly 5,000 years ago, war has always meant interstate war – military conflict between geographically defined sovereign states with organized armies.

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My Comment: I regard today's wars and conflicts as a battle within Islam itself, and we are just the collateral damage from this conflict. In short .... we are involved in an Islamic civil war, and our goal is to make sure that the "moderates" win and/or be able to contain the more extremist elements within that religious community.

If there is a similar experience in history, I would look at the religious wars that swept Europe a few hundred years ago. States were involved, but the religious component was the driving force that fed the fuel to the fire of war and conflict. This so far has been absent in today's conflicts, but it will not be hard for me to see a Sunni-Shiite conflict running out of control and drawing in other states. The Iraq Sunni-Shiite conflict in 2007 gave everyone a heads up on what is possible, and if it was not for US intervention, the bloodbath would match the Hindu-Muslim conflict that occurred when India/Pakistan gained independence from Britain in the late 1940s.