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March 14, 2004
The Tongue-Tied
CIA
By Domenico Maceri/HispanicVista.com
"It turns out we were all
wrong" stated David Kay to the
Senate Armed Services Committee recently.
Kay, the former chief US weapons
inspector in Iraq, said that there was no
evidence Saddam Hussein had stockpiled
weapons of mass destruction.
Kay explained that it was an intelligence
failure. President George Bush has
appointed a commission to find out what
happened.
We will not know the answers until next
year when the commission is expected to
finish its work. Yet, Kay has given a few
hints as to what went wrong. One of them
has to do with the CIA’s lack of
resources and in particular the high
shortage of Arabic-speaking agents.
Apparently, the CIA has only 100
clandestine officers who speak Arabic.
That is not enough. In addition, the
figure masks the number of people who can
deal with the different varieties of
Arabic since the language is not uniform
in the Arabic-speaking world. Although
written Arabic is standardized, the oral
language can vary considerably which may
prevent an Algerian to understand an
Iraqi.
There is no doubt that to be able to find
intelligence you need linguistic
resources and the US is very much at a
disadvantage in a multilingual world.
Shortages of bilingual government
officials are severe. Soon after 9/11 it
was revealed that a vast amount of data
had not been analyzed because of limited
linguistic resources.
Shortages of linguists exist in
Guantanamo, Cuba. Recently it was
announced that the shortages sometimes
force officials to hire people who may
not be 100% reliable. An interpreter, for
example, has been accused of espionage at
the base.
A military report pointed out that the US
Army does not have enough linguists to do
its work in Afghanistan and Iraq.
One solution to solve the shortages is to
hire experts from the immigrant
communities. A few years ago, for
example, the FBI held a job fair in a New
Jersey mosque to hire bilingual agents.
Relying on immigrants to provide
linguistic expertise is something the
country has done in its history. During
World War II, Italian and German speaking
immigrants provided essential language
skills.
Of course, native-born Americans are
learning Arabic and other languages. The
Defense Language Institute in Monterey
(DLI), California, has been providing
language training to American diplomats
and government personnel since 1941. The
Bush administration wants to double the
number of Arabic speakers graduating from
the DLI.
Yet, miracles cannot be made.
Learning enough Arabic to be able to
function takes about 63 weeks of
full-time study. Advanced Arabic requires
another 47 weeks.
Unfortunately, the US has both a great
need for language skills and at the same
time significant challenges.
The needs arise because the US has
interests abroad, which reflect the
political and economic situation of being
the only superpower.
The challenges to meeting these needs are
both internal and external.
On the one hand, the US seems to have
paranoia about having more than one
language within its borders. This comes
out of the fear that the immigrant
population is not learning English. For
some Americans, bilingualism and
multilingualism may destroy the fabric of
American society because of the
diminishing importance of the English
language, which is seen as the glue that
holds the country together.
The other problem is that English is the
world’s lingua franca. Thus many
Americans feel that you can make it with
English only.
That is proving to be false. Recent
events in Iraq and Afghanistan clearly
demonstrate that limited linguistic
resources can easily lead to the
inability to access information. Working
in the dark inevitably translates into a
loss of valuable resources and in some
cases human lives as well.
There is no easy solution to prepare us
linguistically for crises that may
occur. It's difficult to predict
what the "hot" language will
be. Not every American needs to learn
multiple languages. Yet, a second
language should become part of American
education. Learning a third language in
college or at the DLI would become much
easier if one is already bilingual. It’s
the first foreign language that is the
most difficult. Just like in music, it’s
the first musical instrument which is the
toughest to conquer.
Insisting on English only will continue
to pose serious challenges in the world.
Knowledge of other languages will make us
secure at home and may prevent future
Iraqs and Afghanistans.
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Domenico Maceri (dmaceri@hotmail.com),
PhD, UC Santa Barbara, a contributing
columnist to HispanicVista.com (www.hispanicvista.com),
teaches foreign languages at Allan
Hancock College in Santa Maria, CA.
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