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Lost Because Of Translation
The war on Iraq that is.
Rumsfeld’s last memo (leaked to hit Bush by whom? Rumsfeld? Cambone?) includes as one point a "reverse embed" program. Iraqi soldiers would embed with US troops so help U.S. troops learn Arabic and culture. But how would those embedded Iraqis learn English?
The Baker/Hamilton plan will demand an increase in US troops embedded in Iraqi forces. How will these embeds talk to the Iraqis?
The decisive but missing ingredient of the war are translators. Without translation there is no intelligence, without translation there is no training Iraqi troops, without translation there can not be any decent relationship. Without translation the war is lost.
The lack of translators was discussed in the media as problematic in 2003, 2004, 2005 and in 2006 is of course still the problem.
Training troops to a decent language level takes a lot of time:
"It’s easier to train someone to fly an F-14 than it is to speak Arabic," said Kevin Hendzel, a spokesman for the American Translators Association.
One would have expected the DoD to start a program for this obviously needed capability immediately after 9/11 or at least when the first problems occurred.
But as Fred Kaplan documented, the Department of Defense has yet not even started to train very, very basic Arabic to its guys on the ground.
In August 2004, nearly three years after 9/11, the DoD released a Defense Language Transformation Roadmap (pdf). The roadmap included deadlines for certain Arab language training projects. To "Establish ‘crash’ or ‘survival’ courses for deploying forces" the planed date is September 2007.
The troops deployed now and throughout the next year will hardly be able to understand, or say, "yes", "no" or "thank you" in Arabic. Until this year, even U.S. officers were not demanded to take any foreign language course at all.
Missing the capability itself, the military awarded huge contracts to private contractors to provide translators. Titan, now bought by L-3, did so exclusively over the first years and it currently bills some $70 million per month for translators in Iraq. U.S. civilian linguists are payed up to $15,000 per month now. That price is up from $7,000 a year ago. Their job is mostly base bound intelligence translation.
Iraqi civilian translators do get $1,000 per month now and they are those who go out into the field and take real risk. Of Titan employees alone at least 216 have died in Iraq, more than 600 were wounded. They and their families get attacked and when they get wounded the trouble only starts.
But of course there is the ever high believe in technology and the DoD has tried several products that claim to translate English to Arabic and vice versa. So far, with many millions spend, nothing really works and even the better stuff is pretty useless:
"If you ask, ‘What color was the car?’ it will be looking for something like blue or red," he said. But if the person responds by asking which car or says he didn’t see a car, the system will not be able to translate, McCunne said. "It’s a fairly limited type of communication," he added.
The language problem will not go away and I find no sign that there are any real attempts to solve it.
The militray is stuck in a bureaucracy fight about language training management and has not even started any broad basic training. The contracters certainly know how to bilk the public, but they were not and will not be able to provide linguists in sufficiant numbers and with sufficiant capabilities. Technology solutions sound fine but are useless in a dynamic and dangerous environment.
As former Marine Colonel Thommas X. Hammers said:
Insurgencies like that in Iraq are defeated not on the battlefield but by good governance and effective police work. The United States will not achieve either if it can’t understand what its allies are saying, much less what its enemies are saying.
But then, if one has another ten years to get the job done … their just may be some chance of success.
I can imagine a scenario. In which the U.S.was invaded by an alien and stronger military force. Its not clear exactly why this force descended upon America, because several underlying reasons appear to be masked by the justifications made public by the invading force.
Many here, prior to the invasion, would have agreed with the invaders, that America had become a rogue nation personified by feckless leadership and foreign adventurism. Indeed, many here distraught over this degenerative state of affairs, and disheartened over their own impotence to effect change, came to in secret, a willing desire for invasion, if only it would topple the leadership.
But, the invaders were more clever than that, and so came to capitalize on that frustration and use it to for their own mysterious ends. First to scuttle resistance to the invasion itself, and then later to fashon wedges of influence to divide the people and formulate an enduring occupation.
Knowing that America was a religious country, the invaders made a calculated decision, and chose to engender support for one religious group at the expense of the others. In retrospect it was an obvious choice, not only because the Cathloic Church was the largest religious sect in America, it promoted certain values the invader could appreciate. Like for instance anti-individualism. Not to mention the clear association the other large religious sect, the Baptists, had in supporting and enabling the former regime, particularly its hapless but brutal leader.
Prior to the invasion, many would have argued that religious divides in America were a thing of the past, and made irrelevant ever since the election of J.F.Kennedy, intermarrage, and practical political accomidation.
But it was apparently not so, at least since the invasion, whereby the invaders disparaged and demonized the Baptists as militant rum running religious fanatic individualists drunk with fascist power. And at the same time enshrined and empowered the Catholics with key military and government interm appointments that would secure in long delayed elections, demographic , financial, and political control. The Baptists have of course, in response have lived up to their name and splintered into several “party of God” incarnations attacking the Catholics as “un-American commie sellouts”.
Over the years the situation has degenerated with a vengence. From the early Baptist bear trap and hunting rifle attacks on the invasion force itself, through to the steady escalation of attacks on the Catholic “collaborators”. That presumably, have disenfranchized the baptists back into their worst stereo-typed white trash forced trailer park nightmare into a fractured militancy where even the KKK has reemerged as one of the most feared insurgent factions, attacking both the invader and collaborator alike.
But now too, the Catholics have also become suspicious and alarmed at the level of Baptist reprisal attacks, have begun to reconsider some of their “Catholic City” legislation aimed at pushing the Baptist factions still residing in the city back into the rural areas, as a matter of national security. And the occupiers too, seem to have changed sides, increasing the pressure to accomodate new Baptist demands for autonomy. And so it goes, and still no one is quite sure what the ultimate goal of the occupation really is, unless they did it, because they could. I guess we’ll never know, maybe something good will ultimately come of it anyway.
…………………………….
Okay, so I dont have a damned thing to do today.
Posted by: anna missed | Dec 13 2006 20:23 utc | 56
slothrop wrote: …and when there are no “interests” as in the n. sahel, central af. or rwanda, just sit back and watch nature take its course).
no idea why you keep believing/rehashing this nonsense. this particular subject has been brought up on numerous occasions right here in this very bar, and, of course, there are very real interests for the u.s. et al in these very regions. here, read this article.
Apocalypse by design: More on THE WORLD’S MOST NEGLECTED EMERGENCY
It is all about access: timber, copper, cobalt, coltan, niobium, diamonds, gold, oil, natural gas, Gum Arabic, primates—six US zoos this spring paid $400,000 for endangered primates from Congo. Access to raw materials; access to a cheap, replenishable, eager (read: desperate) labor pool; access to blood pools; access to biodiversity (piracy); access to game parks (tourism); access to markets for currency speculation; access to white sand beaches; access to desperate females; access to research subjects (animals, tribes, plants, blood, development failures, bones); access to artifacts; access for museum and zoo stocks.
And access to suffering, because humanitarian relief is big business (and there are never any lasting results to show for it). As Paul Farmer points out, and Noam Chomsky before him, the problem is structural violence, and the system that perpetuates it, and that system is not African. Access is gained through elite networks, involving Presidents and Lords and CEOs and actors, whose modus operandi is—by any means necessary. Organized crime, extortion, bribery, theft, corruption, privilege, white supremacy, total information warfare.
It always starts out as some kind of psychological operation, or perception management or, well, propaganda. But in the end it is about our collective amnesia.
or this
Africa: U.S. Covert Action Exposed
Corporate greed, combined with a desire to never allow the “throne of civilization” to unite and become self-sufficient, continues to join at the hip the U.S. Government, the United Nations and corporate cartels in a persistent war on Africa, a recent congressional hearing concluded.
Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) chaired the hearing, “Covert Action in Africa: A Smoking Gun in Washington, D.C.,” and led the voices of castigation that claimed the U.S. Government, the UN, private militias and western economic interests possessed complete knowledge of pending civil unrest in Africa and fed the fray between African nations. Their aim was to use war, disease, hunger and poverty as covers while continuing the centuries-old practice of rape and exploitation of the continent’s human and mineral resources, testimonies charged.
Among those named as collaborators during the daylong hearing were U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Madeline K. Albright and international diamond merchant Maurice Tempelsman.
or this
View from Rwanda: The Dallaire Genocide Fax: A Fabrication by chris black
Chris Black, since 2000, has been a lead counsel at the International Criminal Tribunal For Rwanda. From that perspective he has seen that Rwanda was not a situation in which the United States and its allies failed to act. On the contrary, it was an example of direct interference by the United States and its allies. Why? Three reasons: the US wished to replace the Hutu regime which did not want to cooperate with US aggression towards Mobutu in Zaire. Secondly, the US wants to reduce French influence in central Africa. The final US objective was and is control of the vast resources of the Congo.
there is a lot more information on this topic available on the internets so it doesn’t really make much sense to keep perpetuating the ‘united states has no interest in african nation x,y, or z’ propaganda line.
related to the issue of the role of global vs u.s. superpower imperialism that slothrop keeps bringing up, stan goff has a mini-manifesto for the project Insurgent American
Core Beliefs
* The United States is the politically dominant core in a global system that is on a catastrophic historical trajectory.
* That catastrophe has social and ecological dimensions that are held inside the same destructive dynamic.
* The global system is one system, with features that deny the independence of many classes of people — some based on economic status, some on gender, some on nationality or race… all features impacting on the very biosphere upon which life itself depends. These features are not separate systems. They are the interacting features of the same global system.
* That system must be replaced. That means that all these features must be considered and challenged simultaneously, without elevating one aspect of the system to the status of “the main issue.” What is the main issue is determined by specific circumstances, in specific times and places. There are many main issues, but never one main issue for all times and places.
* Allowing that system to decay and collapse spontaneously — without a significant and sustained challenge from within the United States — would result in a long, painful, and dangerously reactionary epoch in the United States itself. That is why we put “American” in our name. We have unique needs and tasks here.
Doing nothing constitutes an abandonment of our responsiblity to future generations. But doing “just anything” — without seriously considering consequences — can be just as irresponsible. We need “intelligence,” that is, information combined with analysis, on the system in order to understand it more thoroughly, if the actions we take are to have the desired effects.
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Posted by: b real | Dec 18 2006 6:52 utc | 81
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