The English King Henry II's sons and wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, are scheming against the monarch and plotting against each other. One of the boys, Prince John (whose perfidy as king three decades later will lead to the Magna Carta) is accosted by his brother Richard (as in "the Lionhearted"). "He's got a knife!" John shouts.

"Of course he has a knife," Eleanor replies. "He always has a knife. We all have knives. It's 1183 and we're barbarians!"

Nearly eight and a half centuries later, we're still barbarians, and I'm not just talking about the rabid Islamic extremists who make life miserable for the rest of us, including their fellow Muslims.

Okay, there are some good signs. My friend told me about being in a US military hospital when a badly wounded Sunni insurgent was brought in, a guy who had been shot while planting a roadside bomb. Thirty units of blood were given him but he still was fading fast. A call for donors went out and within minutes there was a line of GI's ready to give. A life's a life, they said.

On the other hand, my friend and colleague said he has never seen as much gore and carnage as he did on this trip. The situation continues to deteriorate and Afghanistan is rapidly going down the tubes, too, says he. That, in turn, is critically threatening the stability of Pakistan. And so on and so on and so on...

Our own barbarism manifests itself in our continuing ignorance of the Middle East, despite our many years bogged down there. Nowhere is that lack of knowledge more manifest than in our seeming, even willful inability to make sense of the intramural fighting within the Islamic religion that's so key to understanding what's going on there.

The split between Sunni and Shiite Muslims dates back four hundred years before Eleanor of Aquitaine was verbally going medieval on her offspring, and has to do with the line of succession from the prophet Mohammed. Over the centuries, some of the differences have blurred and often there have been intermarriage and good feelings. But our recent actions have stirred the pot beyond our powers of comprehension.

Reporting in Monday's Washington Post, Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Shadid, author of a superb book about Iraq ("Night Draws Near"), wrote, "The growing Sunni-Shiite divide is roiling an Arab world as unsettled as at any time in a generation. Fought in speeches, newspaper columns, rumors swirling through cafes and the Internet, and occasional bursts of strife, the conflict is predominantly shaped by politics: a disintegrating Iraq, an ascendant Iran, a sense of Arab powerlessness and a persistent suspicion of American intentions. But the division has begun to seep into the region's social fabric, too. The sectarian fault line has long existed and sometimes ruptured, but never, perhaps, has it been revealed in such a stark, disruptive fashion.

"... Rarely has the region witnessed so many events, in so brief a time, that have been so widely interpreted through a sectarian lens: the empowering of Iraq's Shiite-led government and the bloodletting that has devastated the country; the lack of support by America's Sunni Arab allies -- Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia -- for the Shiite movement Hezbollah in its fight with Israel last summer; and, most decisively, the perception among many Sunni Arabs that Saddam Hussein was lynched by Shiites bent on revenge. In the background is the growing assertiveness of Shiite Iran as the influence of other traditional regional powers such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia diminishes."

That last sentence is especially relevant amidst our current saber rattling toward Iran and this past Sunday's bizarre press conference in Baghdad's Green Zone. Bizarre because reporters' cellphones were seized, no one was allowed to shoot photos or video and the briefers insisted on anonymity.

Our military presented alleged evidence of Iran's ties to Shiite militias in Iraq -- in the form of rocket-propelled grenades (RPG's), mortar shells and especially vicious devices that tear through armor called EFP's -- explosively formed penetrators. All are said to be of Iranian manufacture, purportedly brought into Iraq by the Quds Force of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

(I'm just wondering, by the way, not judging: According to the New York Times, "The shells had serial numbers in English in order to comply with international standards for arms, the officials said. One grenade, for instance, was marked with the serial number P.G.7-AT-1 followed by LOT:5-31-2006." Numbering month-day-year is an American standard. Virtually every other country, including English-speaking ones, uses day-month-year: 31-05-2006. I asked two, Mideast native speakers if the day-month-year standard was also true in Iran's Farsi language and Arabic. They answered yes.)

It would be foolhardy to dismiss the reports totally out-of-hand, just because this administration's truth-telling track record rivals Baron Munchausen's. We've all heard the story of the little-boy-who-cried-Wolf-Blitzer.

Nevertheless, as Tuesday's New York Times reported, "Both Democratic and Republican officials on Capitol Hill said that while they do not doubt that the weapons are being used to attack American troops, and that some of those weapons are being shipped into Iraq from Iran, they are still uncertain whether the weapons were being shipped into Iraq on the orders of Iran's leaders."

George Perkovich of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace added, "I'm not doubting the provenance of the weapons, but rather, the issue of what it says about Iranian policy and whether Iran's leaders are aware of it."

As has been suggested, this administration may just be trying to scapegoat Iran for America's failures in Iraq. But if they are hell-bent on using these allegations as part of a pretext for military action against Iran and, not coincidentally, its nuclear program, they would do well not only to remember the gross errors of far too recent memory ("slam-dunk," anyone?) but the socio-cultural implications of what Iran may or may not be up to. They could be trying to create regional havoc and increase their status as a regional superpower, but their motivations are also about protecting the religious interests of Shiite Muslims.

Until we comprehend that, we should move with the most extreme caution or not at all.

The consequences of a misstep are perilous, and yet our foolish barbarians blunder on. Conservative cold warrior Arnaud de Borchgrave, editor-at-large for UPI and the right-wing Washington Times, reported the following (as noted by Dan Froomkin's "White House Watch" column on the Washington Post website):

"At a farewell reception at Blair House for the retiring chief of protocol, Don Ensenat, who was President Bush's Yale roommate, the president shook hands with Washington Life Magazine's Soroush Shehabi. 'I'm the grandson of one of the late Shah's ministers,' said Soroush, 'and I simply want to say one US bomb on Iran and the regime we all despise will remain in power for another 20 or 30 years and 70 million Iranians will become radicalized.'

"'I know,' President Bush answered.

"'But does Vice President Cheney know?'' asked Soroush.

"President Bush chuckled and walked away."

Michael Winship, Writers Guild of America Award winner and former writer with Bill Moyers, writes this weekly column for the Messenger Post Newspapers in upstate New York.

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