Do As I Say, Not As I Do

It just so happened that I watched the movie Charlie Wilson’s War last night, while reports coming out of Mumbai began to get beyond the grisly descriptions of the deaths caused by Pakistani terrorists and started focusing on what kind of retaliation India might mount against Pakistan. Even though the movie glossed over many of the finer details, it wasn’t much different from most of the other recent thrillers that explored American military involvement on foreign soil.

Our vaunted foreign policy, which played such a big part in our recent election as our candidates trotted out their actual resumes or found surrogates who possessed the right ones, pretty much seems to boil down to “do as I say, not as I do”. A retaliatory stance by India against Pakistan sounds exactly like the reason we are still bombing Iraq, except these two countries have a longer history of being enemies.

So for me, the sixty four thousand dollar question isn’t whether Hillary Clinton can turn the screws on India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh or Pakistan's Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilanias well as the last guy, or the guy before him, but whether Barack Obama can see far enough beyond the constraints of the past to push his Cabinet members to pursue a new American agenda that looks at actually building real relationships with foreign countries rather than maintaining the status quo.