The Clash Of Strange Alliances

In 1992 political scientist and theorist Samuel Huntington wrote “The Clash of Civilizations.” It reads much like an apocalyptic Biblical prediction: people will care less about what country or nationality they are and instead rely on culture and religion for their personal identification. He was wrong. Not only is the theory so ambiguous that any detail pressed would result in ideas that are laughable ( one example is the idea of an “Orthodox Christian” identity would have all Orthodox sects magically getting along), but one can look through history and the events of today and see that for governments, what culture you belong to has little to do with your significance. For detail’s sake we will look at the United States and their bands of misfit allies and alliances.
Lets take a look at the Middle East. Sam Huntington likes to say that Islam has “bloody borders,” a fact that may be true, but these borders often became bloody with the help of United States firepower. The United States is allies with the Saudis, a fundamental Islamist regime that keeps its people in the dark following absurd Islamic laws that are 1, 400 years old. The United States supports the Egyptian dictatorship. The United States gave Saddam Hussein weapons, which he then used to kill hundreds of his own people. And last but not least, the United States gives more military aid to Israel than the whole of Africa receives in humanitarian aid. That is quite a record, and it is one that seemingly has no pattern.
In Europe the United States under the Clinton Administration gave arms to the Turkish military so they could launch a near ethnic cleansing of the Kurdish population resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths and half a million people displaced. The United States also supported Bosnian Muslims during war with Serbs and gave their silent consent as hundreds of radical Islamists filtered into the region to fight the Serbs.
Moving closer to home, Catholic opposition movements in South America have often been targets of U.S. backed paramilitary groups who use assassination and terror against local Bishops and Priests (this despite the fact that Catholicism is the largest Christian denomination in the United States).
If we take a look at Asia we see the same mix match of support. India is given nuclear material by both the Bush and Obama administrations. Bush supported Musharraf’s Pakistan for years, and the United States has remained silent on the issue of Tibet as to not offend the Chinese.
So what does this all mean? It means that we are not on the verge of a war between cultures, religions or civilizations. Nations support each other for a variety of reasons, mostly having to do with resources, money and power. Arbitrary things like democracy, human rights, and cultural similarities have little to do with it.