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

To: HH who wrote (202968)	9/14/2006 3:34:59 PM
From: geode00	Respond to of 281500

No, I said that if we leave and remove support for autocratic regimes, what would be their motivation? Why would how Western countries live within their own borders affect them? Who are the 'them' anyway? Why would 'they' want to see Western countries collapse since this is what provides tremendous oil wealth for the countries in the region. "...Many Iranians will tell you that the key to understanding Iranian politics is to be found not in religious teachings but in the universal exigencies of power: the book to read is not the Koran but Machiavelli. The thing to remember is, as an Iranian diplomat wryly put it to me, citing Tip O'Neill: "All politics is local." And another thing: "Follow the money." President Ahmadinejad may well be genuinely motivated by religious ideology, but if he is, most Iranians will tell you, he is just about the only Iranian leader who is. And he is not the most powerful leader in Iran, least of all on foreign policy. The most powerful is the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who likewise talks tough -- in July he said the Israeli strikes against Lebanon proved that "the presence of Zionists in the region is a Satanic and cancerous presence" -- but is widely viewed as a cunning pragmatist who governs by consensus among an array of competing interests and political rivals. Iranian politicians, like politicians everywhere, are mostly motivated by power, not religious ideology. Religion in Iran, as elsewhere throughout history, has political uses -- and abuses -- that suffuse the struggle for power. In the Islamic Republic, Islam is a mask of power...." alternet.org Your thought processes are at the level of a junior high school student reading propaganda for the first time and believing all of it. Those tiny few who have power are more like each other (the mullahs and the Bushies and the Saudis for instance) than they are like their own countrymen. They delight in having the simple-minded, easily-influenced, uneducated, fearful and aggressively ignorant go after each other while ignoring the true source of absolute evil in the world. PAY ATTENTION! Republicans in Congress are desperately trying to excuse criminal behavior on the part of the Bush administration in wiretapping Americans without warrant AND trying to make such behavior legitimate. THAT is worth worrying about because we are getting very close to losing all meaning in our country.