Impeach George W. Bush Now

I don't believe it. Jim Henley makes a catch:

Because We Care: Reuters finds the most important tidbit in the ISG report:

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.

Guys? It's too late. The time to start to instill competency in the language and culture of the society you're trying to scare-quotes transform is not more than four years after deciding to take the place over.

The ignorance issue has two roots: Americans aren't great at foreign languages and cultures anyway.... The second root is the "humiliate and free" coalition: contempt and anger embedded with "benevolent hegemony" from the start. As with Judith Miller and MET Alpha, it could be difficult to tell who was leading whom. DOD tarred anyone with much knowledge of or sympathy for Arabic language or culture as an "Arabist" and kept them as far away from the project as possible. Ignorance was purity. Who needs a vocabulary when you've got armor?

And Abu Aardvark makes another:

Abu Aardvark: Iraq Study Group: the full report:

"There is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq... For example, on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when information in systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals." (pp.94-95)

Doesn't sound like Baker-Hamilton was much impressed with the "why don't you tell us the good news from Iraq" crowd... or with the Dorrance Smith-style approach of making reporting of the war to the home front a top priority.

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach him now.

Comments

[BillCross]

hey don't forget the number of Arabic speakers etc. that have been dismissed from service for being gay. Between 1998 and 2004 20 Arabic and 6 Farsi linguists were dismissed from the military for being gay.

[christofay]

a super-base embassy compound bigger than the Vatican city staffed with a 1,000 people and only two or three can order lunch at the local greasy spoon.

[dale]

I think the ISG could have saved themselves a lot of work and simply directed people to Brad Delong's blog archieves. Or to Juan Cole's. Or to a handful of other excellent liberal blogs that have been shrill and truthfull.

I would like to thank you Brad for creating this space and allowing this community to flourish. While the country has lived through and orgy of lies and denials, readers here have found sanity (a shrill sanity) and a respect for thoughtful, fact based critique of the war and domestic policy.

[Jodin]

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Be a part of history and have a merry impeachment this season!

[Esq.]

Reporting 8% of attacks requires a better description than "significant underreporting"! Perhaps fraudulent misrepresentation might do.

And I pick that description with care, it is a term of art incorporating an intent element. There is no way one could accidentally design, and not notice and proceed to fix, reporting that left out 92% of attacks.

[save_the_rustbelt]

President Cheney?

Oh Lord.

[Michael Turner]

"I think the ISG could have saved themselves a lot of work and simply directed people to Brad Delong's blog archieves. Or to Juan Cole's."

Juan Cole's especially - one of his most recent entries replays his 10-point program from 2 years ago, comparing it with the ISG recommendations, and finding considerably alignment. Problem is, as he points out -- that was two frickin' years ago. Arguably PRE-civil war Iraq.

O' course, if you really want to get counterfactual and antediluvian, there was that report from James Baker's people BEFORE the invasion, pretty much predicting where we'd be today. Which almost everybody ignored, for reasons that still confuse me.

[Martin]

In an NPR interview on Thursday Dec. 4, Lee Hamilton said that the chances of all the necessary elements coming together for success in Iraq under the ISG plan are "not 50-50" but more than "zero."

The interview was on All Things Considered and the "not 50-50" language comes in at about 9 minutes into the streaming version easily findable on the NPR website.

In other words, Hamilton explictly said that the plan will probably not work. While this is implicit in some language in the ISG report, not to mention in the state of the world, Hamilton's explictness and relative precision (going beyond language such as "the task is daunting") is striking and commendable.

Hamilton goes on to say (I paraphrase now)that the fact that the chances of success are under 50% does not mean we shouldn't try depending on the alternatives and consequences. This point is logically correct but arguably misleading given the weaknesses and even, in some parts, unreality of the specifics of the ISG plan. Nevertheless, the candor about probability of success, albeit partial, is commendable and Hamilton's interview statement deserves more publicity that it has received.

James Baker was part of the interview too. He generally used more optimistic language than Hamilton but did not contradict or attempt to tone down Hamilton's statements.

[kharris]

I have seen it argued that the ISG report, and the list of names involved, constitute an attempt to re-assert the dominance of the professional poltical class. Not an effort to save the Iraq project, which is beyond saving. Not an effort by one Bush to save another. Bush the Younger has squandered his reputation beyond all redemption. The understated, bland, realistic assessment of what has happened, the echoes of what thoughtful people of all political stripes have been saying since the beginning, the absence of any candy-ass hopeful prescriptions - this is all just to remind people that the pros were there all the time.

No place to you see the apocalyptic "everything changed on 9/11" nonsense. That's not because nothing changed, but because things change all the time. Most of these guys were alive for WWII, for Nagasaki, for the Cold War. New threat, new enemy, yes, but not more dangerous. Not a reason to throw out everything we know.

The clear implication is that Bush's assertion that he and only he can make decisions, that he an only he has the resolve to do the right thing, is self-serving crap.

These guys haven't come to save the Iraq project. They have come to save US foreign policy.

[entlord]

Don't forget the security clearance headaches, like the interpreter at Gitmo courtmartialed for removing a document or drawing a map or whatever and the number of people since 9/11 because of relatives in certain countries or junkets to those countries or even having a name similar to that of a terrorist's as some people were arrested due to mistaken identity.
We can remember the Lebanese (?) band members who were detained after a woman on the plane with them thought they were behaving suspiciously and on the rightwing blogs now, they are dissecting the incident of the six mullahs removed from a flight and then turned away when they tried to purchase replacement tickets because they were supposedly speaking in Arabic praising bin Laden and Saddam and criticizing the war in Iraq. The passenger who complained said she was told the content of the mullahs' conversation by another passenger who was fluent in Arabic. (Anyone think this explanation is just a little too precious?)
A radio host sarcastically suggested Muslims have a yellow crescent tattooed on their foreheads was surprised at the number of callers supporting such an idea. Also, we have an elected representative who wanted to take the oath of office using a Qar'an rather than a Bible which ignited a firestorm of controversy as many talking heads spoke of forcing him to use the Bible to teach him a lesson in what freedom really means.
Given that Arabic is one of the more difficult languages, I am told, (sorry my non-IndoEuropean elective was Hebrew) which would make it difficult to "grow" a fast crop of fluent Arab speakers. To add to the problem, the teaching of foreign languages in the US has been in a state of decline for decades or even generations. The final nail in the coffin is the general American attitude towards language proficiency as revealed when the fact that John Kerry was bilingual worked against him (I don't want to know what the Christian Right really thought that meant about Senator Kerry)to the extent that President Bush mocked him and made bad jokes about it.
I think it was in "The Innocents Abroad" that an American character complained that he didn't "mind that the foreigners all spoke a different language than English but it seems they could at least get together and agree on which one."

[johne]

Years ago, the Peace Corps showed that a cross-section of Americans, not all of them middle class or even young, could be taught enough of the fundamentals of a foreign language and culture to be useful abroad. It was done cost-effectively, usually within three months.

What's more, so equipped they could go on to advance the interests of the country they were visiting, as well as their own.

But that was in a time when all that, the learning and the progress, was thought to have value.

[Scott Martens]

I wish I could tell you that that 0.6% number was unusually low for language skills at a US diplomatic posting, but I suspect that it's about the same at the embassy in Brussels. I won't even speculate about the percentage of US military personnel stationed abroad who speak the language of their station.

Some of this is policy. The US rotates its diplomats frequently in order to prevent them from becoming attached to the interests of the places they work in. This means, however, that they can never become experts on them either, and have no reason to invest in language knowledge. Instead, all constancy is vested in a group of local citizens - not Americans - who act as a permanent embassy staff, and all interaction with public takes place through them.

It's a perversely hands-off way of doing things at best, but in an actual war, it's so transparently stupid that it defies comprehension. Local staff, translators especially, are uniquely well placed to give detailed information about your activities to your enemies. Or do Americans think that anyone who speaks English must know enough about America to naturally take its side?

[Esq.]

During a late night drunken discussion, it occured to me that the ISG's statistics on the underreporting a casulties indicate the the Lancet estimate of 600K Iraqi casulties is probably right. Do the math.

[PJgoober]

We should blame those in Middle Eastern studies who boycott the NSEP as well.

[anne]

Yes; the Lancet study range of Iraqi excess violent deaths is all too right, the Stiglitz-Bilmes Iraq war and occupation cost estimate is all too right, the Veterans Hospitals estimate of American soldiers variously disabled in Iraq is all too right. There are new estimates of the material cost to Iraqis of war and occupation that is all too right.

[4degreesnorth]

One has to wonder what the equivalent language statistic was at the US embassy in Saigon.