Reuters: Only six fluent in Arabic at US Iraq embassy-panel (ISG)

[Eugene]

Only six fluent in Arabic at US Iraq embassy-panel
06 Dec 2006 22:20:12 GMT
Source: Reuters

WASHINGTON, Dec 6 (Reuters) - Among the 1,000 people who work in the U.S. Embassy
in Iraq, only 33 are Arabic speakers and only six speak the language fluently, according
to the Iraq Study Group report released on Wednesday.

"All of our efforts in Iraq, military and civilian, are handicapped by Americans' lack of
knowledge of language and cultural understanding," the bipartisan panel said in its report.
"In a conflict that demands effective and efficient communication with Iraqis, we are often
at a disadvantage."

The report, written by five Republicans and five Democrats, recommended the U.S.
government give "the highest possible priority to professional language proficiency and
cultural training" for officials headed to Iraq.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N06193252.htm

[Ian David]

1. Make that five. One of them just came-out as gay this morning.

:sarcasm:

[DoYouEverWonder]

2. You owe me

a keyboard.

[jannyk]

3. Dear sweet jesus

they couldn't organize a piss-up in a brewery!

Six! out of a thousand??!! How the hell do we have any idea of what is going on? Oh, wait......I forgot, we don't.

:spank:

[Solly Mack]

4. Just a reminder

From 2002

Nine Army linguists, including six trained to speak Arabic, have been dismissed from the military because they are gay.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/11/14/attack/main529418.shtml

Those 6 could have been teaching other people Arabic, as well as the culture


"All of our efforts in Iraq, military and civilian, are handicapped by Americans' lack of
knowledge of language and cultural understanding," the bipartisan panel said in its report.
"In a conflict that demands effective and efficient communication with Iraqis, we are often
at a disadvantage."

[jannyk]

6. So did we only have 12 to start with?

What fucking difference does it make whether they are gay or not - they had a speciality that is obviously in very short supply. One that could possibly save US troops lives. So we have an embassy where 994 people out of a thousand haven't a fucking clue what is going on - oy vey!

[Solly Mack]

7. Military has a large language center in Monterey

I'm sure there were more

But hate and ignorance won the day

[aquart]

8. Bigotry killed our soldiers, killed Iraqis.

How many are dead because of those unnecessary and unprincipled firings?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

5. This kind of idiocy is why I didn't join the Foreign Service when offered a

job.

Between finishing the interview process and receiving the offer, I learned that it's State Dept. policy NOT to send Foreign Service Officers to countries they know about early in their careers.

That's right. They deliberately send them to countries they know nothing about.

The reason is that they don't want the FSOs to be too sympathetic to the views of the host country.

For the first ten years or so, they give them assignments in countries where they can be totally indoctrinated into official U.S. foreign policy. Only then are they sent to countries whose language they speak or those that they know something about.

It's likely that a lot of the FSOs in the Baghdad embassy are not only unable to speak Arabic but only a couple of years out of college--where they majored in Spanish or Chinese.

(Japan assigns its new FSOs to be area experts immediately upon hiring and sends them to study at a university in the region where they will make their careers.)