At the most recent Hackers on Planet Earth conference in NYC, Open Source Security guru Robert Steele lambasted the intelligence community for its ineptitude concerning local customs and language as well as our lacking cartography.

You can hear it here: http://www.hopenumbersix.net/speakers.html

Once their Texan/John Wayne dialect did not achieve success, the Bush administration needed the assistance of a special panel for new ideas.

At least as far as the right wing militarists are concerned, the positive side of this is that "there aint no queers in the service." We continue to be governed by fools and apparently like it that way.

Stop firing gays who are proficient in the language.

Idiots.

The competence that this administration has always proded itself on has trickled far down the ranks, evidently.

when I was in the Peace Corps in Korea in the early 70s, for a part of my term there the US ambassador was Philip Habib. Mr. Habib has been viewed as an experienced Asia expert based in part upon that experience, but he did not speak Korean, nor did most of his staff, and consequently his interface and knowledge of the Korean community and culture was limited, and not just limited, but filtered through the Koreans who were fluent in English and who had interests in presenting certain perspectives.

To some degree I'm still annoyed because people like Habib garnered so much undeserved credibility while people like old or current Peace Corps people, both volunteers and staff, are a hugely underutilized resource.

So the story in Iraq is nothing new at all. And of course, the local perception of embassy staffers who do have ability in the language is that they must be spies of one sort or another - and that's often pretty close to the mark.

Very few of our diplomats in Latin America speak Latin.

But the firing of gay Arabic speakers in the Armed Services is the first thing I think of when I hear all the belly-aching about the lack of Arbic speakers we have in Iraq. Just how stupid are we?

... you mean we AREN'T the center of the universe?

I'm reminded of the ages-old Steve Martin routine about going to France. "These people, they don't have the COURTESY to speak English!"

Truth hurts. Learning to speak a foreign language is hard, time-consuming, painstaking, and in the process the learner gains some understanding of the culture. For example, when to use certain forms of address. Who outranks whom in social situations. How to address a teacher, a speaker, a parent, a subordinate, a child, a manager. What is considered polite, what is considered unspeakably rude. In that process, the learner begins to see his or her own customs and culture through the eyes of another. The student learns that what we consider to be normal isn't necessarily, it's just what we do. No more right or wrong than anyone else's culture.

We've been at this ridiculous war for almost four years. Why in hell, with all the money we've had at our disposal, couldn't a few more people have learned Arabic in FOUR YEARS??? Why aren't we recruiting every decent Arabic instructor in the country and putting them to work?

We'd rather blow stuff up than talk to people.

Hebrew is the Middle Eastern language of choice in this administration.

Both State and Defense will fire anyone who speaks Farsi.

"Senator, I'm telling you that our very best translators had incontrovertible proof that Mr. Ahmedinijihad--I mean Mr. Achmedijerkist--well, I just call Mr. A--has a Doomsday Device Proposal Cost-Benefit-Analysis Development Program already in the planning stages. Great Britain has discovered that it's being run by the ghost of Saddam Hussein.

Wait--didn't we execute him yet?"

If our foreign policy has been to AVOID discourse with anyone we don't agree with or side with, and ESPECIALLY not Muslims and Arabs, why WOULD we expect to have Arabic speakers working in U.S. government?

I'd imagine the greatest concentration are in the oxymoronically titled "intelligence" arena, and even there, there's no doubt a shortage.

Then of course, there are many of us who do speak relevant foreign languages who wouldn't work for the US government under any circumstances. CIA tried to recruit me out of college (a foreign studies program, fairly standard thing), and after the third interview (the one where they showed me the 36 page application form that wants your life details, including everyone you've had sex with), I said Adios...

one problem is that native-level fluency is not just something that you acquire while you are working seriously at something else. It is serious, hard, long-term work. Unless there is a career path with some remuneration at the end of years of study at the college/grad school level, Americans are not going to put in the work necessary.

A related problem: no translation of foreign-language books, and no publication of these in the US domestic market. Anywhere else in the world you find that a large segment of the publishing business is translation into the local language. Not so in the US. And so the career path for translators in the US is virtually non-existent as well.

How many people remember the 80s? Anyone remember the time before the Reagan administration started to tax scholarships and financial aid? I was a grad student in the 80s (and Reagan's attack on financial aid drove me out of graduate school). I remember the implementation of taxes on financial aid. The exemptions prove very interesting: medicine, dentistry, the "hard sciences (i.e.: chemistry, physics), Business, Finance, Economics. The tax on financial aid, especially at the graduate level, penalized people for studying subjects without a clear, proven economic usefulness. In the peculiarly American contempt for education that does not have an obvious and simple link to a high income after school the Reagan administration taxed all "unproductive" learning as some sort of self-indulgent luxury that the society would not support by exempting grants to pay for it from taxes. This expressed contempt for other languages and cultures by discouraging the people who would like to study them.

One would think that someone somewhere in power would realize this. That the next place in the world where a U.S. administration may take an interest no one can predict. The attack on education that started in the 80s continues to this day and it bears fruit in the present mess that the Bush administration forced us into. Maybe while people in power are trying to figure out how to sort out the mess the Neocons made they can also do the pretty simple act of restoring support, or at least stop taxing support, for education.