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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (27270)	4/1/2008 2:55:33 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 71588

"You can see why I and other readers would be confused." Not at all! The concept of Nationalism seems simple enough for anyone to understand.... (For example: Vietnam certainly cooperated with it's allies of convenience, Communist China and the Soviet Union, in opposition to the Americans, for as long as it was in their interests to do so. Then - after the American departure and the forceable reunification with the southern-half of the Vietnamese speaking peoples, what of strategic importance happened next? The Vietnamese/China border war as Vietnam reasserted it's power and regional influence and independence from China, and returned to what had been the dominant motif over Centuries in the Vietnam/China relationship: tension, rivalry, and cooperation only when both sides perceive it to be in their own interests.) Why, just the other day I was posting to you that 'shifting alliances of convenience' were NORMAL in the Middle East --- that there were centuries of historical examples of this to draw from. About the only thing sufficient to force what are normally and routinely enemies and rivals (such as Shiites and Sunnis, Persians and Arabs, Turkomen and Kurds, etc.) in any kind of temporary 'an enemy of my enemy is my friend' sort of cooperation would be the injection of FOREIGN OCCUPIERS into the equation... where it would be normal (most anywhere in the world, even in the good old U.S. of A.) for disparate groups of locals to temporarily cooperate to resist foreign domination or control. I also posted several days ago to you that what you had not done was establish any basis for a claim that Iran was in any kind of systematic or sustained or significant manner arming SUNNIS (as you had claimed) or former Bathists, which are both historically it's enemies... (as opposed to the co-religionists in the Shia population of Iraq, which it most definitely has an interest in propping-up... so as to have a strong Shia buffer State between it and the Sunni enemies.) It would seem that I have been consistent in all of this, and that there is no contradiction in my words... if you simply look at them as they are (& don't try to sex them up or otherwise change their plain and simple meaning by 'reading your own interpretations' into them.)