There was something surreal about watching President Obama take the oath of office from a hotel room in Karachi, Pakistan. Several times, I wondered whether there were more suicide bomb barriers surrounding his dais or my hotel. Suicide bombers had nearly destroyed the hotel a year or two earlier, and the predictable reaction—to erect sufficient vehicle barriers to stop more than one simultaneous attack—had of course been implemented. And so I watched, from 13,000 miles away, as America took what I profoundly hope will be the first of many steps towards reestablishing its international reputation as a symbol of freedom, all the while knowing that I was under strict orders from our hosts not to leave the building.

All around me were little security instruction sheets, thoughtfully Xeroxed by the hotel staff and placed in every room. From the typical (“this water is unsafe for drinking; kindly enjoy the complimentary bottle of mineral water provided”) to the stern (“do not stand on balcony; snipers may be active”), the warnings combined to deliver the message that, thanks to the efforts of less than 1% of the population, Westerners are simply not welcome in Pakistan. 99% of Pakistanis we met were hopeful, interesting people, happy to talk to an American (and to ask us about our new president—more about that in a different post). But all I had to do was look out my hotel room window to realize that it is the 1% who rule the country.

View from my Karachi Hotelroom

As they so often do, this picture tells the story better than I can. The balcony is enclosed in a net, lest grenades be thrown up onto the landing. The wires above the pool are for god-knows-what security technique. (My guess: since they are either grounded or energized, probably an anti-eavesdropping measure which doubles as a mechanism for defeating radio frequency bomb triggers, although my mobile phone worked just fine underneath them, so perhaps not.) There were magnetometers, x-ray machines in the lobby, and nearly every entrance to every building was peopled by thoroughly un-reasuring armed guards. There were small trucks parked in the parking lots of both “Western” hotels, each filled with four chain-smoking Pakistani infantrymen, on top of which was mounted what looked like an M60 (.50 caliber machine gun). Two bomb-sniffing Labrador retrievers worked the parking lot. ID checks were performed endlessly.

I doubt that any experience since 9/11 has reminded me that this really is a war. Not a war which gives our government the right to abrogate our Constitution, but a war nonetheless. And until it ends, Americans traveling abroad had better remember that the actions of our own government (and in particular the recently-departed administration) catalyze reactions abroad which pose as grave a threat to our well-being as any other. (Until 2002, there had been no attacks against Western targets in Karachi. That all started after we reacted to 9/11.) In the end, no matter how hopeful I am that the inauguration of President Obama will set us off to righting our standing worldwide, we will remain “the enemy” for a long time to come.

Think it’s far-fetched?  Perhaps, but as last week’s news that the ICC has issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Al-Bashir shows, the issue of state sovreignity (especially for senior members of the executive branch) remains very much a paradox for The Hague.  (See this on-point but somewhat dry article in the European Journal of International Law.)  While some of us may rest on our first world laurels and be content to watch the ICC indict the Sudanese president and thereby attract the collective disapproval of the Arab League as a result, we shouldn’t rest too easily:  it’s not quite so different for Harris’s retired Prime Minister to see his own name on an ICC arrest warrant—and escape it only by calling upon the US (ex parte to the court and at whose bidding the fictional PM performed his actions) to save his skin.  Is Harris’s fictional PM simply a thinly veiled portrait of the very real-life Tony Blair, against whom similar claims have been made?  You be the judge (or let British journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft do so for you in his Slate article).  Clever writing indeed.  Let’s hope it remains fiction.

As I was standing on line to get a drink (cranberry and lime–I’m fighting a cold), I stared listlessly at the name tag of the fellow standing next to me, hoping it would ring a bell, or otherwise save me from contemplating my longer-than-desirable distance from the bar.

It did.

The fellow’s name tag read “Michel Floyd, CTO and Senior VP, Knowledge Networks.” His company was being honored last night also. It took a minute, but I finally remembered that Knowledge Networks is the polling organization that performed the study I blogged about last week to you all on behalf of PIPA. So I asked him if it was the same Knowledge Networks, and indeed it was (is). He knew all about the study (in fact, it was his work), and he proceeded to regale me with further interesting statistics about how the Fox viewership separates itself from other mainstream news. He has fielded many an irate call from NewsCorp about that study, and has defended it often enough that he’s pretty practiced at it. Of course, I couldn’t resist testing him, so I bugged him about selection bias on the PBS/NPR viewers, which he thought about for a minute and then began to argue against–only half-way convincingly.

Michel has promised to forward me some of his other tidbits, and I will send them out to the list as soon as I get them. One of them is this: Fox viewers are twice as likely to remember the brand names advertised in commercials than are the viewers of CNN. Twice as likely. Why? How? He’s going to forward me the data.

I suppose this goes to prove that the world is absurdly small. What are the chances that I would have discussed the study and blogged it eight days earlier? That I would we awaiting my cranberry-cum-high fructose corn syrup next to him? That his company would receive an AO100 award the same year mine did?