Maybe the neocons aren't so wrong about the State Department.

QUOTE:
"One thing we never understood is that India has always been the major threat for Pakistan," said former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Wendy Chamberlain, now the president of the Middle East Institute.

Seriously, how the fuck do you not realise that?

That is jawdroppingly clueless.

Is Wendy Chamberlin really Reese Chamberlain in "Diplomatically Blonde"?

Wow. Clearly they never had to take geography or history classes during their entire lives.

Did no-one bother watching Gandhi?

Hmm. Maybe though, she was using "we" rhetorically, like you do when you want to point how you yourself were right about something but "we" didn't act on it.

No? Okay.

Even if she did mean it that way, she'd be wrong. I think everyone in America who knows where Pakistan is, roughly, knows that they don't see eye-to-eye with India on a few things. Ghandi did win the academy award, after all.

I think everyone in America who knows where Pakistan is,

How many people do you think that is though? (I'm not being entirely facetious either.)

Not many, but her statement seems to imply that the misunderstanding was among people who knew something about Pakistan otherwise it doesn't really count as a misunderstanding or non-understanding.

I mean, you wouldn't say of somebody who has never heard of cricket "they just don't understand how to handle leg-spin bowling." It's true, perhaps, but sort of meaningless.

Considering that someone that could be the next president talked about the "Iraq/Pakistan border," I'm not surprised.

I for one didn't know how fucking big pakistan was. particularly the bit at the top that no-one controls.

There's an unusual set of statistics in the book "the wisdom of crowds" that goes something like a University of Maryland poll found that americans in general think that they should spend 1 dollar on foreign aid for every three dollars on defence. The simultaneously think that they spend too much on foreign aid even though in reality they actually spend 19 times as much on defence as foreign aid. Which is because they think that they spend 24% of their entire budget on foreign aid, (it's actually less than 1%)

There are a lot of incredibly poorly informed, and deliberately misinformed people in the US. (though the gist of the book is that on average they make the right decisions, though I feel that the book doesn't take into account the skewing effects of the mass media, and the limited range of options put in front of the population.)

Maybe they unconsciously conflate foreign aid and foreign intervention/presence.

Maybe they feel that fired bombs and bullets are donations...

Actually the problem with most clueless Americans (I would hazard) is that their hearts are basically in the right place. They truly see Iraq as a noble enterprise, which it certainly could be made to seem in the naive, hazy-rosy world they choose to inhabit.

Maybe they unconsciously conflate foreign aid and foreign intervention/presence.

I think that a lot of it is actually down to the belief in american exceptionalism, and that america's involvement in the outside world is almost entirely altruistic, and that foreign policy is actually america being a non-interventionist country being dragged into foreign adventures almost against its will in order to make the world a better place. Hence the enormous over estimation of the amounts spent on foreign aid (particularly given the amount of attacks in the media on aid to africa etc)

I wonder how many americans see america as a huge commercial empire, with its military tentacles reaching into nearly every country on earth is support of their enormous business concerns.

Not enough.

what would happen if more did?

It seems to me that a large part of american politics seems to hang on this notion of ignoring what happens in the outside world, and the role of america in it. What would happen if more americans were to suddenly realise that the way that things are (cheap gas, globalisation, american allies) wasn't actualy the natural order of things, and that that modern globalisation could only take place under the umbrella of enormous american military power and intervention in other countries.

Would we see a massive lurch back to the non-interventionism of the pre-ww11 era, or would interventionism get more pronounced?

I really don't know.

On the one hand, there is a very strong isolationist streak in the US body politic that goes back as far as George Washington's strictures about "avoiding entangling alliances". On the other hand, such an isolationist stance was never really compatible with the country's geographic and economic weight (even in the 18th c.) and is even less reasonable now.

And I am the Life wrote:

QUOTE:
I think that a lot of it is actually down to the belief in american exceptionalism, and that america's involvement in the outside world is almost entirely altruistic, and that foreign policy is actually america being a non-interventionist country being dragged into foreign adventures almost against its will in order to make the world a better place.

To be fair, Americans of a certain age didn't exactly come by that habitual worldview entirely dishonestly, and no doubt many have succeeded at instilling it in their children.

QUOTE:
Hence the enormous over estimation of the amounts spent on foreign aid (particularly given the amount of attacks in the media on aid to africa etc)

I wonder how many americans see america as a huge commercial empire, with its military tentacles reaching into nearly every country on earth is support of their enormous business concerns.

Is the lower case 'american' some kind of (cheesy) deliberate rhetorical device? You're capitalizing other words, so I have to ask.

I think many more Americans have come to realize that but don't understand why it could be a bad thing yet. One should also at least pay lip service to how problematic the ramifications of moving to demilitarize the United States would be in their own right.