The lack of Arabic translators in Iraq appears to stem from a Bush Administration decision to outsource translation services to private contractors. Called “linguistic support,” these companies, two of the largest of which are Titan Corporation and DynCorp International, have received billions of dollars to provide language interpreters to the Iraq reconstruction effort. But many of the supposed “translators” sent to Iraq were untrained, had poor language skills, or couldn’t speak Arabic at all. In many cases the contractors appear to have conducted no screenings or interviews with prospective translators. And Titan Corporation interpreters are accused of involvement in two cases of prisoner abuse in Iraq and one case of espionage at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
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So you had been out of Arabic from the mid-’90s to 2002 when they hired you to teach soldiers Arabic prior to their Iraq deployment.
That’s right, with zero experience. I’d never been to a Middle Eastern country.Do you feel you were qualified for the job?
Was I the right guy to teach the course? No.Did they give you any instructions?
I asked them, “What do you want me to do?” And they said, “You’re the expert.” Look, it was that REEP got the contract and then they sent an e-mail to me, because it looked like I spoke Arabic, asking me if I would come teach the course. That was it. There was no interview. There was no anything. No accountability. Nothing.How did they know you really spoke Arabic?
Because it said so on my resumé. Because I said so when they asked me.
Failure to communicate
Yet another story of greed, corruption and incompetence in the privatization of the US occupation of Iraq: Radar has an interview with a former private Arabic instructor who barely spoke Arabic:
pretty smart huh??
A nation not understood is a powerless nation.
I spent much of yesterday laughing my ass off at a 1943 U.S. Department of War field guide to Iraq. (“Iraq is hot!”) Hilarious. In all seriousness, though, U.S. military language training and cultural education have improved by leaps and bounds since 9/11. It’s too little, too late, but impressive nonetheless. I read this interview, though, and I think this is more a problem with the U.S. government contracting system than anything else.
Yes, I think this is the key point: cronyism, corruption and political interference has made military subcontracting highly detrimental to operations. In fact, considering all the examples we have of this in the US and elsewhere, public-private partnerships are entirely discredited in my eyes. This kind of capability should be developed internally.
[…] El Amrani, writing in The Arabist, links to a story about the recruitment of someone who barely spoke Arabic to work as a translator in Iraq. “Yet another story of greed, corruption and incompetence in the privatization of the US […]
I am inclined to agree with you, Issandr, regarding the scope and depth of subcontracting, but contractors are not going away anytime soon. On the one hand, you would think the waging of wars should be the exclusive responsibility of the state. On the other hand, though, there are many jobs in the DoD that are and should be contracted — running the chow halls, for example. What you need, though, is oversight by both Congress and the internal inspector generals to make sure the system is working and the government is not getting cheated. The IG’s have been doing their job; Congress has not.
Thank you for this post, Issandr. I’m Dustin Langan, the subject of the Radar interview cited here.
Despite the way the lines above were interpreted, I actually read, write, and even speak MSA quite well. At the time I was hired to teach the isomersion course, I did not feel I was the right guy for the job. This does not mean I “barely” understood the language; only that I have very high standards. In fact, the six students told me they were very happy with my presentation and teaching style, and that they had learned a lot. Nor was this my first teaching job: I had previously taught at the University of Washington and at the Seattle Language Academy.
In fact, there are a lot of Arabic instructors serving the military who are not qualified for the job, and they are native speakers.
If you are interested in learning more about the increasingly dysfunctional relationship between the sordid world of government contracting, I recommend Peter Singer as a good place to start.
Another problem Ive seen among both government and contract workers and Arabic instruction is that the government and contracating companies continue to fund individuals who either have no capacity or no real hope of learning to write, speak or read Arabic competently. Im an administrator of Foreign Language Area Scholarships (FLAS) at a university, and Ive just read through applications of people who have had 5 years of funding from NSEP, the DoD, etc to study the language and are still getting 1’s (out of 5) on their profiency exams. Holy waste of money and some of these people are now Arabic “experts.”