At first glance, the war in the former Yugoslavia and the Iraq War appear to be fundamentally different. The conflicts in Yugoslavia hark back to an old kind of war, a form of nationalistic and ethnic warfare that seemed all but extinguished in modern Europe. Beginning in 1991 and lasting throughout the 1990s, it was a war fought with rifles and knives and in which neighbors killed neighbors. It was also a war that gave renewed urgency to the concept of genocide and recalled the horror of concentration camps. The Iraq War, on the other hand, initially pitted a superpower against a moribund dictatorship in a high-tech blitzkrieg. Soon, however, it too was mired down in ethnic conflicts, and the sophisticated weaponry of the US military was disabled by improvised explosive devices employed by insurgent forces. Moreover, even before these affinities became evident, both wars evinced other important similarities. Both erase the difference between civilians and military, and both extend indefinitely. Finally, both wars are significantly influenced by accompanying media wars, and in both Islam is a crucial discursive determinant.

From the beginning, the Iraq War was defined and marketed as a war on Islamic terrorism. A perceived link between radical Islam and violence informed the planning and execution of the war and the current counter-insurgency strategy. Similarly, in the former Yugoslavia, the warring parties are split along ethnic and religious lines.