The Battle of King's Mountain was fought by folks who were not especially loyal to the state government, and was as much for local autonomy as it was against the rule of George III.

But, I'm not really sure what you're getting at.

There've been a number of such convoluted wars: the whole experience of Yugoslavia during World War II among Chetniks, Tito, etc. Or China's civil war/World War II, where you had warlords, anti-Japanese patriots, anti-Communist patriots, Nationalists, Communists, etc., all mixed together.

Wars are usually complicated, and humans are rarely driven by single factors as motives. Even World War II, one of the more "simple" wars included independent actors (e.g., De Gaulle) and allies with very opposed goals (USSR and US-UK, although Churchill and FDR didn't always see eye-to-eye, either).

I've been campaigning against nation building since the early '90s, so I can't much disagree on the remaking the country issue. Toppling Saddam was a good thing but we clearly haven't figured out how to ensure the replacement is suitable.

James, I do take your point re what you were and weren't claiming. (Since I'm old enough to remember the Iranian hostage crisis, when everybody knew that moderate Sunni Muslims like you found in Saudi Arabia were the "good guys," while "Shiites" like they had in Iran were wild-eyed fanatics, I put little stock in instant experts learnedly discoursing on "Salafism" and "Wahabism" and other suddenly important categories someone learned about last Tuesday.)

Of course, the "horribly more complex" business is why some of us argued beforehand that there was no way the US was qualified to remake a country it had no prayer of even knowing anything much about.

Especially egregious of what you have noted is this assumption that Shi'ites are by definition pro-Iran.

The reality is that during the decade-long Iran-Iraq war, the Shi'ites did not revolt against Saddam Hussein, much less defect, en masse, to the Iranian side.

The paucity of coverage between the Iranian Shi'ites (who center on the holy city of Qom) and the Iraqi Shi'ites (who center on the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala) I think typifies the tendency to overlook the complexities.

It would be equivalent to arguing that all Democrats are members of the DLC, or all Christians are Catholics.

The fact that these elements are willing to car-bomb each other ought, if anything, to underscore said complexity.

AP; The Iraqi government's campaign to win support for the country's new constitution has won the critical backing of the most influential Shiite religious leader, less than a month before a national referendum on the draft charter. [...] Grand Ayato...

I was thinking more of the point in time where we were still ostensibly "the United States" and not two countries.

In any case, the point of the last paragraph in the original post wasn't to argue that the Iraqi situation is "normal" or "just like the U.S." but to make a broader statement about how we tend to group things intellectually and forget that it's just a construct. We think Sunni vs. Shia vs. Kurd when, in reality, it's horribly more complex.

The only reason the Kos crew isn't nuking the DLC is because of the intervention of Hurricane Katrina.

And I think you draw the lines a little too tightly when you argue about the absence of conflict within the Union and Confederate camps. The reality is that the Civil War was not only between North and South, but within states. The most obvious (and longest-lasting) example is merely West Virginia, which seceded from Virginia; but there are other examples such as northern versus southern Alabama, certain parts of Arkansas, and the continuation of "bleeding Kansas."

This would clearly suggest that there were folks prepared to engage in the equivalent of car bombs (including the slaughter of entire towns) against folks who by geography ought to be neighbors.

That didn't happen. Closest you come are the NYC draft riots, which was spasmodic rather than sustained.

Of course, the DLC and the Institute for Policy Studies aren't car-bombing each other's members.

Today's dose of NIF - News, Interesting & Funny ... Weekend!