Last December, we learned that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad employs 1,000 people, of which six speak Arabic fluently. (One of the more obvious recommendations from the Iraq Study Group was the suggestion that the Bush administration “accord the highest possible priority” to language training. To which officials everywhere responded with a collective, “Duh.”)
The good news is the number of Arabic speakers at the U.S. Embassy has gone up 66%. The bad news is, when you start with six, that kind of increase is still pretty small.
Of the 1,000 U.S. employees at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, only 10 have a working knowledge of Arabic, according to the State Department.
That is still a slight improvement from last year when, according to the Iraq Study Group, six people in the embassy spoke Arabic.
A 2006 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report noted the shortage of speakers of Arabic, which the State Department classifies as “superhard,” is acute at U.S. embassies in the Muslim world.
Just as an aside, “superhard”? That’s the formal description from the State Department? What comes after that, “wickedhard”?
I digress. In April, the State Department had started taking action to correct some of these problems, but they apparently haven’t gotten very far. According to the GAO, “more than one-third of public policy diplomacy positions at Arabic language posts were filled by people who did not speak the language at the designated level.”
In December, confronted with questions about this, Tony Snow said, “[Y]ou don’t snap your fingers and have the Arabic speakers you need overnight.”
I’d add one thing: if you’re the president, you actually can snap your fingers and have the Arabic speakers you need overnight.
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