A different kind of war by Stephen J. Cimbala Religion is the ideal putative motive for feral killers, because it ensures the perpetrator of absolution for sin and an appropriate eternal reward.
War is ultimately cultural.
The United States and other developed states are socially and culturally habituated to modes of warfare as practiced since the end of Europe's religious wars. The end of the Cold War has also removed many of the inhibitions that held back the disintegration of sovereign nation-states, as in former Yugoslavia. As state disintegration has proceeded in the 1990s, wars of identity and ferocious hatred have taken the place of traditional insurgencies of the Maoist type, based on political ideology. The idea that primordial urges and fears, of definitions of religious and cultural identity, could motivate killing seems unacceptable to a person whose cultural heritage came via ancient Greece, through the Enlightenment in Europe and thence into eighteenth and nineteenth century liberalism. Throughout the 1990s, from Haiti through West Africa to Afghanistan, unforgiving wars of identity have generated killing sprees by tyros armed with grenade launchers or, that failing, machetes.