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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: HG who wrote (4029)	10/10/2001 11:10:00 AM
From: Original Mad Dog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Of course we went to war with Kuwait because our oil interests were at stake. What I am saying is that the world seems to expect the U.S. to intervene even when it is not in our self interest. Lola's comment was that our foreign policy was "selfish". And I say, why not? In Kosovo, however, we had little at stake. There is no oil there, just a bunch of dirt poor Serbians and Albanians with no natural resources of interest to us. In Somalia, we had nothing at stake either. I still believe that our arrangement with Pakistan is one of expediency. I think that it will be accompanied by severe pressure (by means of both carrot and stick) for Pakistan to stop its role as a terrorist supporting state. That includes in this first phase support of the Taliban, and in fact we have seen that the most visible Taliban supporters are being kicked out of the government. The real question is, what is the next phase? I hope that it includes a very simple definition of what terrorism is (see other post I linked to yesterday) accompanied by using our position in the world to combat it. I don't think any of us are in a position to say that the Kashmir incident (the latest one, and the years of terrorism that preceded it) did not come up in our discussions with Pakistan. Publicly, if the US rants and raves about it now, it will have no way of using Pakistan to achieve its initial goals in Afghanistan. BTW, Americans have also died as a result of separatist violence relating to India. Until last week, the biggest terrorist act (in terms of number of deaths) had been perpetrated by the Sikhs who blew up the Air India flight out of Canada, on which Americans and many Canadians were killed. Statements of opinion are different from statement of truth or falsity.

To: HG who wrote (4029)	10/10/2001 1:02:44 PM
From: Selectric II	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The implication from your post and some others here is that the U.S.'s self-interests in taking those actions were against everyone else's. I reject that. Sure, we do things in our own self-interest. But a critical distinction is that if we were as self-focused as some unnamed individuals here might suggest, we would have simply occupied Kuwait ourselves and taken it over as a 51st state. We didn't. If the USA was the evil colonial power we're accused of being, while we were at it we probably could have occupied much of the rest of the Middle East in a matter of days, if not hours, too. Saudi as the 52nd state, Iraq 53rd, the Emirates, etc., too. We could have, militarily, and had the opportunity. Didn't. If we're so evil and opportunistic, why not?