What counts as foreign policy experience

According to Huffington blogger Mayhill Fowler, Obama recently claimed that he had superior foreign policy experience to Hillary or McCain.

"It's ironic because this is supposedly the place where experience is most needed to be Commander-in-Chief. Experience in Washington is not knowledge of the world. This I know. When Senator Clinton brags 'I've met leaders from eighty countries'--I know what those trips are like! I've been on them. You go from the airport to the embassy. There's a group of children who do native dance. You meet with the CIA station chief and the embassy and they give you a briefing. You go take a tour of a plant that [with] the assistance of USAID has started something. And then--you go.

"You do that in eighty countries--you don't know those eighty countries. So when I speak about having lived in Indonesia for four years, having family that is impoverished in small villages in Africa--knowing the leaders is not important--what I know is the people. . . .

"I traveled to Pakistan when I was in college--I knew what Sunni and Shia was [sic] before I joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. . . .

"Nobody is entirely prepared for being Commander-in-Chief. The question is when the 3 AM phone call comes do you have somebody who has the judgment, the temperament to ask the right questions, to weigh the costs and benefits of military action, who insists on good intelligence, who is not going to be swayed by the short-term politics. By most criteria, I've passed those tests and my two opponents have not."

So, what should we make of this?

First off, it strikes me as arrogant, but a lot of what Obama does strikes me that way. Also he should have kept quiet about knowing the difference between Sunni and Shia - it just reminds people that he was raised as a Muslim when he lived in Indonesia.

Speaking of Indonesia, yes he lived there but he was a young child at the time. From the excerpts I have read of Dreams From My Father, his visit to Africa was all about meeting family, not about finding out how governments are run.

So where does that leave his assertion that it is more important to know people than to know foreign affairs? I have some secondhand personal experience with this. My sister-in-law recently lived in China for three years. You might think that this gave her deep insights into US/Chinese relations and knowledge about some of the repression practiced by the Chinese government. You would be wrong. She has great admiration for the Chinese people and that blinds her to the actions of the Chinese government. She has trouble separating the two.

Does Obama have this problem? Maybe. He certainly seems to think that he knows everything there is to know about foreign relations.
 
Finally, Obama's experience gives him insight into northern Africa and the Indian Ocean. That still leaves a lot of the world that he does not have a personal relationship with including the rest of Asia, sub-Sahara Africa, Europe, South America, and out North American neighbors (who he sometimes says that he no longer wants to trade with).

He might have gained some experience in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He even chairs a sub-committee but he hasn't bothered to hold any meetings. The same is true for immigration reform where he was theoretically part of the group but didn't actually show up for 7 am meetings.

Do we need a president who feels that his childhood experiences make him an expert on foreign affairs?