Interesting Interview about the War on Terror

kwaigonegin said:

and that's one of the hardest things to achieve! national identity and patriotic loyalty. Why? 1 word! TRIBES!
There are literally hundreds of tribes in the mid east and Africa and they are fiercely loyal to it.... before any political government, religion or entity.

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I think that's a vast over-generalization resulting from bad, but popular (and Orientalist) "expert opinions" about the Middle East in particular. If we're going to get into the history of tribes and the role they play in people's self-identifications in the modern Middle East, we could be here a long time. But I will say that "tribes" are one of the sub-national loyalties of various types that often divide states before they experience the long process of forging a national identity with citizenship. Other examples might be regions (i.e. pre Civil War US), religions, ethnic groups, feudal economic classes. Every country has to deal with these "impediments" to making a homogenized national identity, usually through a bit of incentivization, some force, and some willful misrepresentation of history. Every nation has to deal with the problem, so there's no reason to think that "tribes" pose any greater problem to Arab nations in the 21st century than, for example, regional differences did in the formation of a "British" identity in the 18th century.

And these "tribes" themselves are usually not what you make them out to be. In some countries, for example Yemen, they are very real, very strong and people strongly identify with them. In Yemen tribes are the dominant political entities. But in many other countries, tribal identities are so blurred and falsified by history, as well as irrelevant to life in a modern, urban environment, that plenty of people don't really identify with tribes at all (for example Egypt). "Tribes" are not a magic word that condemns the Arab Spring to failure. That's why I think fears of a "tribal civil war" in Libya are totally unfounded. And in any case, the Middle East is not unchanging. History is still happening. There's no reason to believe that because "tribes" were once powerful, they will always be so.

There is a country in the Middle East that is more than half way to nationhood: Iran.

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I would say Iran is a nation. Persian cultural identity has always been strong, and Iran's nation-formation started by overthrowing the personal, feudal ruler (the Shah) and replacing him with a society that was supposed to be based on citizenship. It was "forged in blood" during the Iran Iraq War. Now the final question is the role of religion (Will Iran be a nation of citizens or a nation of believers)

airsuperiority said:

If it comes back down to Huntington's clashes of civlization, then I guess we'll be seeing China allying up with Middle East, and then slowly gain more influence with the lesser EU states.

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The clash of civilizations is just a pretty bad thesis.

I don't know enough about Iran to say as much as you do, thus my tentative sentence. But if your right it is very stupid not to accept Iran as it is, don't try to undermine it and and cooperate when opportunities occur.

Iran is an old nation, claiming it is not is about as off as claiming that China is not a nation.
There are some issues with the perceived Arab overrepresentation in Irans leadership, but that is steadily reducing.
Also, after what happened in Lybia, Iran would have to be insane to abandon its nuclear programm or seek western reapproachment.
Ghadaffi tried to take the reapproachment road, was by far less threatening to western interests than Iran, and was promptly killed by the west for it.
Imagine you are an advisor to Ahmeddinaschad, could you honestly council reapproachment with the west? I do not see how.

Indeed while the US is forced to remove all its military from Iraq because military personnel might otherwise be prosecuted in Iraq for crimes committed in that country, it still threatens Iran against interfering in Iraq while considering it quite natural to do so themselves.