@gq: are we answering our own questions now? it appears we are. do i think you’re incorrect? yes i do. will i explain why? of course i will. regardless of what you may think it implies sovereignty is “A nation or state’s supreme power within its borders.”. the areas in question are within pakistan’s borders. the level of what you consider “control” is irrelevant. i’m not sure if you realize this, but you can only cross the border into a country legally if you have that country’s permission. no permission, no legality. what is being proposed is crossing into a sovereign nation’s borders and attacking people based on what country A thinks is “actionable intelligence”. it implies that the u.s. thinks pakistan can’t control or knows what goes on in its own borders, is some backwater failed state, and that the u.s. is some all-knowing, all-protecting benefactor that is always absolutely correct about everything, which has been made abundantly clear to not be the case. to put it another way, if canada started conducting raids on the michigan militia because of crimes in toronto without explicit approval of the u.s. government, don’t you think it would piss a few people off?

i love it how my countrymen think it’s ok to send military/companies/etc. into places whether those there like it or not, but froth at the mouth at any implication of foreign entities or agreements having domain here. i’ll take your standard and double it!

as for the “vast majority” agreeing with the answer, 50M elvis fans can’t be wrong, right?

If there is a territory that you’re not governing, then there’s no real soveriegnity.

We wouldn’t be attacking Pakistan itself. We would be attacking al-Qaeda in territory that Pakistan doesn’t control.

1. Who is “We”?
2. What theory of sovereignty do you subscribe to? For example, is it okay for the U.S. to bomb Maoist controlled districts in India because India’s governments can’t exercise sovereignty over them?
3. Are you on crack?

We wouldn’t be attacking Pakistan itself. We would be attacking al-Qaeda in territory that Pakistan doesn’t control.

As for the Invasion argument, yes, that is my own interpretation of the language in his speech. I may be wrong. You may be right. I just don’t see how any sovereign nation will allow overt foreign military presence on its oil.

I’m especially suspicious of this because of the international education component. It simply doesn’t make sense settled in next to the hawkish tones of the rest of the speech. As you noted, it’s difficult to perform educational outreach and cross-cultural communication if you are blowing up the schools. It’s inclusion makes me think that this speech is intended to be all things to all people. We are simply supposed to ignore the warlike exhortations, and focus on cultural outreach, or vice-versa, depending on our political leanings.

This is, at best, another example of dissembling and posturing from a candidate who is supposed to — indeed, who has built his campaign around — honesty. Alternately, it is an indication of an actual desire to invade, and an actual conviction that the best way to resolve our country’s foreign policy nightmare is at the point of a sword.

I have really wanted to believe in this candidate. It’s painful to feel that belief slowly being ground into powder.

Thanks for the analysis and the well deserved evisceration of the speech.

“When it’s your family members dying, and your communities being attacked, and MUSLIM countries being invaded, all that propaganda about how wonderful America is and how it means well (which is essentially what something like the American Voice Corps would be if it isn’t part of a larger, material, change in American policies and actions – just a new Voice of America) doesn’t count for shit.”

I understand your point, but you know that America isn’t invading only “Muslim” countries, right? Unless you think that the entire Latin American continent, East Asia, SouthEast Asia (Vietnam, Laos, etc), Cuba, and the islands we call “territories” of the United States are all part of the “Muslim” world. And the US has indeed invaded/gone to war/occupied/conquered these countries.

Excellent post. I agree with much of what you are saying, but I must admit that I am surprised that you are surprised at Obama in the first place. When has foreign policy ever been a partisan affair in the U.S.? What has the track record of the Democratic Party been, after all? And why should Obama be any different?

Nevertheless, an excellent post!

IMHO, he’s missed the plot. Invading Pakistan is not the question. How to address a potentially failing one is. Given that the political gymnastics that will be involved, even to change from one civilian prime minister to another, are sufficient to give the most informed observers splitting headaches, we can’t expect the real issue to become something that lends itself to campaign circuit.

I’m sure you’ve a better read on the Pakistani public than I, but I suspect that the degree of public support for US involvement will depend a great deal on which institutions and constituencies the US is seen to be working with. If the US is actually putting pressure on Musharaf and supporting the Army, wouldn’t that actually put us on the side of the bulk of civil society in Pakistan?

1. Whether foreign troops are in a corner or here or there is immaterial to the conception of a nation-state. One can see Turkey’s refusal to allow US fueling and staging rights in the leadup to Iraq war.
2. You assume that the military dictatorship in PK will consent to some mutually beneficial agreement for US troops in Waziristan [Leave aside the thought about what insights our US troops possess that the Pakistani army doesn't]. But can you really conceive of such a reality without the explicit consent of the public? The same public that I should remind, has demonstrably gone away from the dictator? Is there any possible way that this alienated public, devoid of exercising any opinion, will go along with such a strategic partnership? Especially since there is a _lack_ of any democratic process? This is no chicken and egg. This is clearly before and after.

And when this non-consenting public finds US military engaging in battle with Taliban troops on their soil, I believe we will end up with a severe case of hundreds of thousands of new “insurgents” to go against our troops.

and ps. Are we fighting them in Pakistan so we don’t have to fight them in Afghanistan?

However, with regard to Pakistan you need to be more convincing. You argue that US military involvement in Pakistan could only be an invasion, which ignores centuries in which allies sometimes operated in each others’ territory for mutual benefit, which is more or less how the US is supposed to be operating in Afghanistan (and sometimes in Pakistan). The claim that “in Pakistan” means the same thing as “all of Pakistan” is hard to square with Obama’s (qualified, but real) support for Pakistan’s barely legitimate government and questionably reliable military. It sounds to me like he’s trying to toe your line: increase democracy and civil society in order to make Pakistan a better ally, and do that by leveraging the influence and reach we now have within Pakistan.

And you dismiss his public diplomacy efforts as irrepparably tainted by US hegemony, when he’s describing a multilateral education initiative (note the emphasis on “listen”) which ought to produce precisely the kind of nuanced and realistic understandings of the rest of the world which might in the long term alleviate this problem. (Personally, I think he ought to have pointed out that our public diplomacy problem is not just that “our enemies” have a loud voice in the discourse, but that our own public face has been … well, Bush, who doesn’t really qualify as an ally these days.).

I do wish he’d said something about the nature of the civil war going on in Pakistan — that’s the nuance which is most obviously lacking — and acknowledged that the (semi-?)autonomous regions are a long-term issue in which mere conquest is not likely to be an acceptable long-term solution.