The American Conservative

On November 7, 2005, I sat in seat 13C on American Airlines flight 4631 from Austin to Raleigh, which then connected to another flight to Washington D.C. On the Austin-Raleigh portion of the journey, America representative to the Arab world, Karen Hughes, was seated in 13B.

We had met before, in the late 1990s, while I was working for the Austin Chronicle and Hughes was working as Gov. George W. Bush chief press aide. After exchanging pleasantries, I inquired about her new job. About three months earlier, Bush had appointed her as a new undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. Her portfolio: engaging the Arab world and as the State Department Web site explains, confronting “ideological support for terrorism around the world.

Given that she was tasked with confronting radical Islam, I asked the obvious question: was she learning to speak Arabic?  she quickly replied.  too old for that.Okay, so what were the Bush Administration plans for development in the Islamic world? Were they going to encourage literacy, sponsor English-language programs, or perhaps build some libraries? Hughes, glanced over and made it clear that language skills and libraries were not in their game plan. “I don’t care if they can read, Hughes declared. “I just don’t want them to bomb us.

Therein lies the essence of the Bush Administration attitude toward the Arab world: we don’t need to learn the language. We don need to engage them on a cultural level. We just need to engage our massive military machinery and all will be fine.

But all is not fine. The Second Iraq War is growing more catastrophic by the day. The danger of another bloody conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians continues increasing. The death toll from the fighting in Lebanon between government forces and Islamic groups continues to rise. And America image throughout the Islamic and Arabic-speaking world continues to be pummeled.

Perhaps at no time in recent memory have America relationships with the Islamic and Arabic-speaking worlds been at a lower ebb than they are today. And yet, the U.S. military, the U.S. State Department, and American intelligence agencies appear to have little, if any, interest in increasing their Arabic language skills. That dire lack of language capability will hamstring America’s ability to engage the Arab world for years to come and will likely assure that the “long war that the Pentagon keeps talking about will become a reality.

There are now about 280 million people on the planet who speak Arabic. That means that Arabic is about the fourth most-common language (after Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and English). By next year, some 43 million Arabic-speaking people who will be using the Internet.

Contrast those numbers with these two figures: 6 and 33.

Six. That the number of American personnel stationed inside the U.S. embassy in Baghdad who can speak Arabic fluently. That number comes from the last December report from the Iraq Study Group. While most of the media attention focused on the report recommendations for a multilateral approach to American involvement in Iraq, one of the most important findings was buried on page 92: the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, which has some 1,000 State Department personnel (that number does not include all of the service and security workers) has just 33 people who can speak Arabic at all and only 6 of whom are fluent.

And 33. Coincidentally, that’s also the number of personnel inside the FBI who can speak any Arabic at all. According to a Washington Post story published last October, the agency International Terrorism Operations Sections (ITOS) “do not require any agents to know Arabic, even though the sections coordinate all foreign terrorism investigations. Only four agents in ITOS have any familiarity with Arabic and none of them are ranked above elementary proficiency. The Post story, by Dan Eggen, cites a deposition that was part of a lawsuit filed by an employee against the agency. The head of one of the ITOS sections, Michael J. Heimbach, testified in a deposition that “knowledge of the Arabic language is not a skill set utilized by the counter-terrorism group.

Further, out of the 12,000 agents at the FBI, only 6 were ranked as either “advanced professional or “advanced professional, plus when it came to Arabic skills.

Need more bad news? There plenty. Last August, a study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the State Department is drastically short of trained Arabic speakers. Of 160 positions requiring proficiency in Arabic, only 64 or about 40 percent were filled by personnel proficient in Arabic. When it came to specialists in Arab culture, the GAO found that 75 percent of the jobs at the State Department were filled by people who couldn’t meet the requirements. “Many public diplomacy officers in the Muslim world cannot communicate with local audiences as well as their positions require, said the GAO. “For example, an information officer in Cairo stated that his office does not have enough Arabic speaking staff to engage the Egyptian media effectively.

There are many reasons for the lack of Arabic speakers. First and foremost among them: Arabic is an extremely difficult language for English speakers to learn. It requires a minimum of one year of full-time study to become capable in the language and far longer than that to be truly fluent. That kind of time commitment has little appeal in an impatient American culture that wants things to happen right away. But the gulf between the U.S. and the Arab world isn’t just about language. It also about a basic level of cultural awareness.

Last year, Jeff Stein, the national security editor at Congressional Quarterly, wrote a story which revealed that some of the highest ranking members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Congress don’t even know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. In one instance, Stein asked Willie Hulon, the new head of the FBI’s new national security branch, which Islamic sect dominated Hezbollah and Iran. Hulon responded “Sunni.

Wrong.

When Stein put similar questions to U.S. Representative Terry Everett, the outgoing Republican vice chairman of a subcommittee in the House of Representatives responsible for intelligence issues, Everett said that the split between Sunnis and Shia was “differences in their religion, different families, or something. Another member of Congress had a similarly vague response, saying that the “Sunni are more radical than the Shia. Or vice versa.

Stein continues to do great reporting on this issue. On May 25, he wrote about an early 2001 meeting between Doug Feith, a leading neoconservative and architect of the campaign for the Second Iraq War, and Patrick Lang. Feith was looking for someone to head the Pentagon’s office of special operations. Lang, a former Green Beret who’d done three tours in South Vietnam, was a top candidate. Or at least he was until he met with Feith. When Feith learned that Lang spoke Arabic, and spoke it well, and that Lang “really know[s] the Arabs Feith told Lang that it was “too bad.

In the neocons worldview, knowing Arabs, and even worse, knowing how to talk to them, counts as a negative. Needless to say, Feith didn’t hire Lang for the job.

It’s not just the Bush administration and their neocon fellow travelers who discount the need for Arabic. The U.S. military has more interest in high-tech weapons than in cultural and language skills. That’s easily proven by looking at the defense department’s spending.

This year, the U.S. military will spend about $200 million on the Defense Language Institute, the school that teaches foreign languages to about 3,500 soldiers and other government officials each year. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is now purchasing more than 181 copies of the F-22 fighter plane each one of which costs $361 million. In other words, the U.S. is spending nearly twice as much to buy a single airplane as it spends per year imparting language skills to its personnel. And it is doing so even as U.S. troops on the ground in Iraq continue to be desperately short of Arabic-speaking personnel who can help them deal with the ongoing insurgency.

The need for more Arabic speakers is not just about Iraq, it’s about America’s strategic future and the changing character of warfare. Military historian and theorist Martin van Creveld, who teaches at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is among a growing group of analysts who believe that warfare is moving away from major clashes between nation-states and toward more insurgent-type of conflicts. “Future wars, he wrote in 2000, “will be overwhelmingly of the type known, however inaccurately, as low intensity. For van Creveld, that means that the world’s military forces will “have to adjust themselves to this situation by changing their doctrine, doing away with much of their heavy equipment and becoming more like the police.

Police work requires knowing the people in the neighborhood. It requires discussion and frequent contacts. With regard to the Arab and Islamic worlds, it means understanding the world views of groups like Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and, of course, al-Qaeda.

Chet Richards, a retired Air Force officer who speaks Arabic and was stationed in Saudi Arabia, believes that the changing character of warfare means that “cultural knowledge is as important  or more important than putting munitions on targets. Alas, Richards, who has written extensively on both modern warfare and on the strategies of America’s greatest military theorist, the late John Boyd, believes that “when it comes to cultural understanding of the Arab world, we aren’t even on first base.