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

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (116099)	10/3/2003 12:29:07 AM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

> Something in common, other than just belonging to the same species, is needed, for any "natural sympathy" to be elicited. I would say the more you have in common the more likely you are to relate to the other side. But I don't think it is essential, especially when the magnitude of injustice or misery is too high. Many people contribute towards eradicating hunger and disease in the third world and they have no racial or cultural ties to them. I remember this Iranian lady who having lost family members to Iraqis and having seen the huge support of Arab states for Iraq against Iran, had considerable antipathy for Arabs. Nor was she a Muslim to feel any religious ties to them. After spending a month in Israel she came back as Palestinian supporter! In her words, "I could see how they were squeezing the life out of Palestinians and I cannot stand quiet about it". I just could not believe it. > Israel and India have almost no Muslims in their armed forces. The U.S. desperately needs Arabic-speakers, and people who understand the local culture in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet, the tribal distrust, is probably going to make it hard to recruit them, hard to retain them, hard for the rest of the military to trust them. This is probably going to be a chronic problem. I think you are mixing too many issues here. Afghans do not speak Arabic; they speak Dari which is dialect of Persian (almost like the difference between France's French and Canada's). Both Afghans and Iranians (and Tajiks and certain portions of other nations) can understand each other easily and are mostly Muslim. So you could recruit them for your cross border communications. Most of them do not sympathize with Arabs, so in theory it should be even easier to get them involved in Iraq. In fact, the tribal ties that you mention means that it is much easier to get an Afghan or an Iraqi to cooperate against members of other tribes than not. So that too is not a problem. The problem is that we have universally betrayed and or alienated so many people around the world that we just cannot play those cards anymore. And since we are unwilling (incapable?) to change, that is going to be a chronic problem.