Quote:
|
Originally Posted by alexamenos
was it a ship? perhaps its the vodka, but I vaguely recall a plane going down in china, and things gettin' a little testy but nothing coming of it. in my humble opinion (which is to say my grossly inflated opinion of myself), I don't think wars and such ever actually start over such trivial things....like when Franz Ferdinand or whatever his name was got shot before the start of WWI or when Confederates started taking pot-shots at Ft. Sumter. Those wars were already on their way, and the "one thing" explanations are really just a simplification for the war-narrative.
anyway....we don't want to take on one-billion nuc-lar chinamen. the chinese could have strung the sailors up by their nuts and we'd of done nothing other than bitch and moan. iran is different...we've got a bunch of folks itching for a fight with iran, and sooner or later the iranians will give us sufficient provaction even if this ain't it.
cheers
|
From my memory, there were several incidents that occurred over about a year and a half. the two KEY events were our <inadvertant?> bombing of the Chinese embassy somewhere in the former Yugoslavia, and a Chinese fighter jet clipping a US lumbering (prop) spy plane in air space that we claim is international, and the chinese claim is their own. after the collision the jet crashed (and the piolet died), and the US plane was forced to land immediately, which meant in China. Where the chinese boarded the plane and confiscated all the equipment.
However, an important thing happened with the plane downing... the chinese people went NUTS much more than the chinese government was comfortable with. The GOC (governemtn of China) had been aggressively stirring nationistic tendencies and dissing the US since the embassy fiasco, and staging anti-american demonstrations, and what-not, but with the plane, the staged demonstrations actually became real and spontaneous and freaked out the GOC, because they lost control of the size and the scope of the level anti-american sentiment. Fringe nationalist and military figures also tryed to seize influence by further stoking the flames. THe GOC are not dummies and while they viewed the nationalist lever as a crucial policy tool, they also knew that they NEEDED stable relations with the US. THe GOC immidiately began to take efforts to slow down (rather than pump up) the demonstrations while simultaneously talking tough internationally. After this incident they have NOT used the US as the source of nationalism stoking very often, and have instead largely relied on Japan and Taiwan for these exercises.
Iran is different. Ahmadinejad only has ONE arrow in his quiver. He ONLY has nationalism. his economic policies are widely panned (and the economy was anemic before he showed up, and will continue to be so for a while), and people are chaffing at the fundamentalist social restrictions... the ONLY thing he has is rah rah nationalism, and he will play that card over and over and over again. Its hard not to when its all you got. He will "yank the lion's tail" every chance he gets.