Suicide Bombers

Yemeni policemen stand next to wreckage at the scene of a car bombing outside a police academy in Sanaa, Yemen, Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2015. A suicide bomber driving a minibus full of explosives killed tens of people Wednesday morning as cadets gathered near the police academy in the heart of Yemen's capital, Sanaa, security officials and witnesses said. (AP Photo/Hani Mohammed)

Every week there's a new report of a suicide bombing somewhere in Central Asia or the Mideast, or both. Distressing, to say the least. I view the perpetrators as crazed, demented individuals, whose departure from the realms of rational thought have relegated them to the status of sub-humans. But that's not exactly true. Jeffery William Lewis has a good article about suicide bombers on Ohio State University's website.
    If you look at it another way, they are simply warriors fighting for a cause. When we (that's the royal we, as in Western Civilization) send our soldiers off to fight a war, we expect that some of them are going to die. That is a price we, as a society, are willing to pay in order to achieve victory over our adversaries. Islamic jihadists are no different.
    Our goals are incompatible, that is, whatever we are trying to achieve is completely different from what the Islamists want to achieve. Actually, our goals are more likely mutually incomprehensible. We don't reject our opponents views because we disagree with them, we reject them because we don't even understand them.
     It's a matter of belief, and that is something you grow up with. We are all part of our own societies. Rejecting our society's values is going to leave us isolated.
    The Mideast and Central Asia are having big problems now because now they have big populations. A hundred years ago nobody lived there. The land was inhospitable, there was no water and certainly no treasure. Then along came Western Civilization and we brought technology and irrigation, plentiful food and anti-biotics and now the Mideast and Central Asia have zillions of people, zillions of people with a 14th Century culture. That culture worked fine when were only 2 or 3 people per square mile, but it's not adapting so well to the new, modern, densely populated areas we have now.
    Left to themselves I am sure they will sort themselves out in a hundred years or so. It is likely to be a hundred years of continuous civil war. Human societies can be notoriously difficult to sort out. A hundred years may seem like a long time, but it took Western Civilization 500 years to make the same cultural advance. All we have to do is resist the urge to send in big, modern, professional armies to try and smite a few cockroaches.