If the Al-Qaeda HQ underestimated the toxic nature of anti-Shiite feeling, it is unlikely the Americans will be cut any slack for the same error. Nonetheless, US forces seem to have learned quickly on the ground in Iraq. Remember that up until this spring, the common wisdom in Western diplomatic and media circles was that the guileless, gun-slinging Yanks should model themselves after their British counterparts. UK forces walked the streets of Basra without helmets to mingle more humanely among the population whose hearts and minds they now owned. However, as the situation in the Shia port city deteriorated, it became clear that British "soft power" had become a euphemism for digging in at the Basra airport. The bulk of the fighting against Moqtada al-Sadr's Jaysh al-Mahdi and Iranian elements was left to the Maliki government and those gun-slinging Americans. In retrospect, it was perhaps an error in American judgment to let the Brits patrol one of the country's most prominent Shiite regions in the first place. After all, having been awarded the post-WWI mandate for Iraq, London showed its ignorance of Shia sensibilities by emplacing the Emir Feisal, a Sunni, to rule a Shia-majority country.

At this point it's worth asking, given the ardent and frequently violent nature of the Sunni-Shia split, why haven't we seen this conflict played out in the Muslim diaspora? The short answer is that since most of the world's Muslims are Sunnis, most immigrants are as well. The more complicated answer is that the psychodrama of the Muslim Middle East's majority/minority divide is indeed unfolding before us, but we just haven't recognized it as such.

In the context of Western political cultures, Muslims constitute a religious minority. However, insofar as most are Sunni they retain a Sunni identity and think like a majority - a majority who for close to 1400 years has demanded that others tailor their attitudes to their worldview. There is nothing in the historical character of Sunni Islam that would make it anything but hostile to the idea of compromise.

This of course is not to say that all Sunnis and Sunni immigrants are supremacist; nor do I mean that the Shia are liberal-minded by nature. My point is merely this: The set of issues that Western policymakers, security experts and journalists typically think of as Islamic in character might be a much more specific symptom, the rigid and rejectionist mindset of a majority culture that will not willingly accommodate itself to others, never mind to a culture that is increasingly uncertain of what it stands for, a culture that treats with the likes of Yusuf Qaradawi, homophobe, anti-Semite and anti-Shia ideologue.