http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/121106A.shtml
Three Years Too Late
By William Fisher
t r u t h o u t | Columnist
Monday 11 December 2006
While the Washington press corps chased the nine wise men (and one wise
woman) of the Iraq Study Group as they scampered from the White House to
Capitol Hill to press conferences to a multitude of talk show appearances in
their efforts to pull Dubya's chestnuts from the Iraq fire, some journalists
seem to have missed some of its most important findings.
One of the more alarming was that, of the 1,000 employees of the massive
new US Embassy inside the Green Zone bubble in Baghdad, there are - wait for
it - SIX who are fluent in Arabic.
In a very real sense, that pitiful number could be a metaphor for one of
the most serious flaws in the entire Iraq adventure. We invaded a country
about which we knew virtually nothing. Not only didn't we know the Arabic
language, we knew nothing about Iraq's religious sects, tribes, culture,
sensitivities, customs, traditions, mores, or the Byzantine
interrelationships among all these attributes.
And that predicament is not limited to the State Department, which runs
the new embassy. It is also true of the armed services, the CIA, and all the
many other parts of our national security apparatus.
This critical deficiency raises serious questions about the practicality
of the Iraq Study Group's recommendation that a greatly increased number of
US military trainers be embedded into the Iraqi Security Forces, down to the
company level. Is anybody wondering how you go about training a soldier you
can't speak to? Or how you understand quickly enough when one of your Iraqi
comrades decides he cares more about his tribe than about his country and
makes you "the enemy?"
The shortage of Arabic speakers was one of the red flags the State
Department sent to Donald Rumsfeld before the invasion. But the outgoing
SecDef wasn't about to listen to any advice from State - or most anyone
else. And even if incoming DOD chief Bob Gates is prepared to heed that kind
of counsel, it may be too late for it to make any difference. Producing
Arabic speakers takes years, and the US doesn't have years. Like most of the
challenges the US now faces in Iraq, there is no quick fix for this one
either.
There is only so much translation we can expect from Arabic-speaker
General John Abizaid!
Given the importance of the Middle East to US national security
interests long before the Iraq invasion, how is it that one of the world's
most multicultural countries is unable to deliver men and women fluent in
Arabic?
Some of the reasons are easily explained, others are much more
complicated.
Among the simple ones: American education has long neglected foreign
language study, and American students have for years shown little appetite
for learning them; Arabic is a particularly difficult language to learn;
some applicants simply don't want to serve in Iraq; and there are strong
indications of the unwillingness of many Arab and Muslim-Americans to apply
to agencies they see as having contributed to the "Islamophobic" environment
that pervades our country today.
Moreover, while the number of college-level Arabic language students has
increased substantially since the attacks of 9/11, many drop out - and even
those who complete their courses will not come anywhere near qualifying as
fluent.
President Bush appears to have understood the importance of the issue;
in 2005, he ordered Porter Goss, then the director of the CIA, to increase
the number of Arabic-speakers by 50 percent. The CIA - and the FBI, the DOD,
and the Department of Homeland Security - all failed to meet that goal. What
they did achieve was an exponential increase in job applications from
Arabic-speakers.
That was largely the result of a recruiting binge by the national
security agencies. For example, they offered generous sign-on bonuses of up
to $25,000 for new hires fluent in Arabic and other crucial languages. They
participated in college job fairs. The CIA placed ads in local newspapers in
communities where there is a heavy concentration of Arab-Americans. One
featured a photo of the Statue of Liberty with the words: "For over 100
years, Arab-Americans have served the nation. Today we need you more than
ever."
Last year's intelligence reorganization law also authorized the agency
to study so-called "heritage communities" such as metropolitan Detroit's
Arab populations, with foreign language abilities. It also earmarked money
for a pilot program to recruit foreign-language speakers into a civilian
linguist reserve corps.
All these activities resulted in US national security agencies reporting
substantial increases in employment applications. But the ratio of
applications to job offers remains low.
One result, according to the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based
think tank, is that analysts at the CIA, the FBI, the Defense Intelligence
Agency, and the National Security Agency are "awash in untranslated
gleanings of intelligence" in Arabic. The Foundation also said there are not
enough interpreters to handle detainees in Iraq.
The FBI says that since 9/11, the agency has processed 30,000 applicants
for jobs as linguists in Arabic, Farsi, and other tongues. But it points out
that "out of 20 applicants, we'd be lucky to get one or two."
So what has happened to these applicants? Many have been rejected
after - or before - their first interview. Many more have been waiting years
for their security clearances. Among these job-seekers, it should be no
surprise that by the time those clearances arrive, the applicants have
already found other jobs.
But the key constraint appears to be that Arab and Muslim Americans are
frequently rejected for security clearances on the preposterous basis that
they have contacts in the Middle East - like friends and families.
Recruiters are particularly hesitant to approve people in this group of
applicants; no one wants to be the guy who approves the next "sleeping
Osama."
The shortage is no less acute at the State Department. A bipartisan
State Department advisory panel on public diplomacy headed by Edward
Djerejian, a former ambassador to Israel and Syria, found that only 54 of
279 Arabic speakers employed by State were fluent. Of those, only six were
fluent enough to appear on Arabic television programs.
The Baker-Hamilton group made 79 recommendations to the president about
how to craft a new strategy for our involvement in Iraq. These have been
treated with both praise and scorn. But the issue may in fact be moot.
Like the group's exhortation to increase the number of Arabic-speakers
in our Baghdad embassy, its recommendations are unlikely to produce a
"victory" in Iraq. We needed the ISG three years ago - when there still
might have been a few good options. Now there are none.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle
East and in many other parts of the world for the US State Department and
USAID for the past thirty years. He began his work life as a journalist for
newspapers and for the Associated Press in Florida. Go to The World
According to Bill Fisher for more.
***
The Huffington Post - Dec 11, 2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-palermo/milton-friedman-jeane-ki_b_35992.html
Milton Friedman, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Augusto Pinochet: What a Team!
by Joseph A. Palermo Friedman, Kirkpatrick, & Pinochet
The founder of the "Chicago School" of economics, Milton Friedman, the
former US Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and the
military strongman of Chile, Augusto Pinochet, have all departed this
mortal world. Friedman called for the most extreme privatization measures
even in the impoverished Third World; Kirkpatrick was the intellectual guru
for US-backed "authoritarian" regimes; and Pinochet was a practitioner of
the Kirkpatrickian world view.
In the 1980s, during the dictator's glory days, Kirkpatrick used to enjoy
General Pinochet's company with a quiet cup of tea in his private
residence.
Pinochet, perhaps more than any other US-supported dictator, put into
practice Kirkpatrick's social theories and Friedman's "free market"
economics. In the name of "anti-Communism," Pinochet liquidated the
Parliament, censored the press, jailed and tortured his opponents, made
mass arrests without due process, terrorized his own population, and then
privatized nearly all of Chile's public institutions. He gave back the
copper mines and operations to Anaconda and Kennecott Copper, and the phone
lines back to ITT. He presided over a 17-year dictatorship responsible for
the murder or "disappearance" of tens of thousands of innocent Chileans.
(He launched "Operation Condor," which was responsible for assassinating
his political opponents all over Latin America and the world, including the
car bombing of Orlando Letelier and the 25-year-old journalist, [Ronni
Karpen Moffit], in Washington, DC in September 1976.)
On September 11, 1973, General Pinochet led a military junta that ousted
the democratically-elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. His
co-cospirators among the Chilean military bombed La Moneda Palace; Allende
went on the radio to call for his supporters to resist the illegal coup
d'etat. Allende himself was murdered (though false stories of his "suicide"
were sent out to the US press). The Chilean military declared martial law,
imposed a strict curfew, turned the soccer stadium in Santiago into a vast
execution hall, and sealed off the entire country from outside observers,
including the Red Cross, for thirteen days.
When the dust settled, the US had a reliably pro-"free enterprise,"
anti-Soviet dictatorship in charge of Chile. Pinochet soon established
himself as one of the worst human rights abusers on the planet. Milton
Friedman's acolytes descended on Chile, and ran the Chilean economy -- the
"Chicago Boys" they were called -- and they used Chile as a laboratory for
their "free market" theories. The model they imposed, which amounted to
economic "freedom" combined with political repression, created growth for
the rich few while impoverishing the less fortunate many.
Soon after the coup in Chile, information began to leak out that the Nixon
Administration had ordered the CIA to engineer the coup that toppled
Allende and installed Pinochet, and that ITT corporation had given the
Nixon White House $1 million toward this end. The Church Committee report
of 1976 exposed the embarrassing details of the operation, which included
economic sabotage, political meddling, assassinations, financing of street
gangs, and military coordination between the Chilean armed forces and the
CIA.
Nixon's National Security Adviser (and later Secretary of State) Henry
Kissinger was behind many of the machinations that overthrew one of Latin
America's longest standing democracies to be replaced by one of the world's
longest lasting dictatorships. It is one of the most sordid and sorry
chapters in the history of United States foreign policy.
Friedman was responsible for the Pinochet regime's economic theories,
Kirkpatrick created the geo-political framework, Kissinger engineered the
coup, and Pinochet provided the muscle. They were a great team that will
not be missed.
Copyright 2006 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
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