    43

    With the Persian superpower out of the way, the Byzantine

    citizens thought that only their internal opponents mattered.  They

    forgot that their real enemies might exist somewhere outside the

    comfortable borders of their own land.

    While the Byzantines attacked each other in the streets over fine

    points of theology, a horde of Bedouins and backwater merchants rode

    out of the unfamiliar deserts to the southeast, roused to a frenzy by a

    new religion that made battle a holy deed.  These armies of Islam

    snatched nearly everything the bickering Byzantines had.  The

    Mohammedans took Syria, Palestine, Armenia, Mesopotamia and

    Egypt in a mere twelve years.131  Then they gradually pried North

    Africa, Spain, Greece, Yugoslavia, and all the rest from Byzantine

    hands.  In 1453, even Byzantium itself would fall, to become the new

    capital of an Islamic Empire.  The city's name--Constantinople--would

    disappear from the map, replaced by the Turkic label "Istanbul."

    Like the citizens of Constantine's capitol, we would rather fight

    each other than acknowledge a simple reality: that there are people in

    the outside world who relish the opportunity to destroy us.  Our 1980s

    anti-nuclear movements were not directed at makers of atomic bombs

    in Pakistan, Iran, Iraq or North Korea, just at those in Washington.  Our

    protesters against U.S. meddling in El Salvador or Nicaragua couldn't

    have cared less about the deaths of millions in Cambodia, the murder

    of 20,000 in Syria, or genocide in black Africa.  They focused their

    attention solely on American misdeeds.

    Our internal fights often prevent us from even seeing external

    dangers.  Under Ronald Reagan in 1983, the U.S. sent its marines to

    Lebanon as a peacekeeping force in the hope of slowing the civil

    violence that was tearing Beirut apart.  One day, a member of the

    Ayatollah-inspired Hezbollah drove a truck filled with explosives into

    the building where the marines were encamped, killing over 200 men,

    most of them unarmed and sleeping.

    American politicians and reporters did not condemn the groups

    which had declared all western infidels impure as excrement, fit only

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