Friday, June 18, 2004
The downside of American monolingualism
As several pundits have pointed out, lots has been wrong with the American response to the Sept 11th terror attacks. Sam Freedman points to an issue that has received very little attention in the media and one that has been touched upon peripherally on this blog -- that advanced jet fighters are not going to stop any terrorist, but a deeper understanding of the context of terrorism might.
LESS than a year after the Soviet Union launched a satellite named Sputnik in October 1957, America answered with a counterstrike. It was a piece of legislation, the National Defense Education Act, which aimed at harnessing brain power rather than weaponry for the cold war. Mostly, the statute poured federal money into stimulating the study of mathematics and science, disciplines most relevant to the arms race, but a portion provided incentives for universities to develop skilled speakers of strategic languages, especially Russian.
Over more than three decades, as the support for language study was written into other federal laws, a steady stream of 30,000 or more American university students took Russian courses each year. They became not only the translators, cryptologists and intelligence agents required for what President John F. Kennedy famously called the "long twilight struggle" between Communism and the West but also the scholars, diplomats and sundry Sovietologists who in many ways enacted the policy of détente and assisted in the peaceful resolution of the cold war.
Now, nearly three years since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda and amid a turbulent occupation of Iraq, Congress and the Bush administration have failed to endorse and endow a similar cohort of civilian experts in the languages of the Muslim world.
Experts in language study offer several reasons for the administration's seeming indifference. President Bush's involvement in education is centered on the No Child Left Behind law, which itself has not been fully financed. Neoconservatives inside and outside government have assailed Middle East studies departments - the likely recipients of any increased federal money for advanced study of Arabic and related languages - for alleged bias against the United States and Israel. It is expensive and time-consuming to conduct security checks of Arab immigrants interested in serving as linguists.
"We can hope, but hope won't do it," said Richard Brecht, a former Air Force cryptographer who is executive director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Language, a joint project of the Defense Department and the University of Maryland based in College Park. "Five billion dollars for an F-22 will not help us in the battle against terrorism. Language that helps us understand why they're trying to harm us will."
LESS than a year after the Soviet Union launched a satellite named Sputnik in October 1957, America answered with a counterstrike. It was a piece of legislation, the National Defense Education Act, which aimed at harnessing brain power rather than weaponry for the cold war. Mostly, the statute poured federal money into stimulating the study of mathematics and science, disciplines most relevant to the arms race, but a portion provided incentives for universities to develop skilled speakers of strategic languages, especially Russian.
Over more than three decades, as the support for language study was written into other federal laws, a steady stream of 30,000 or more American university students took Russian courses each year. They became not only the translators, cryptologists and intelligence agents required for what President John F. Kennedy famously called the "long twilight struggle" between Communism and the West but also the scholars, diplomats and sundry Sovietologists who in many ways enacted the policy of détente and assisted in the peaceful resolution of the cold war.
Now, nearly three years since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda and amid a turbulent occupation of Iraq, Congress and the Bush administration have failed to endorse and endow a similar cohort of civilian experts in the languages of the Muslim world.
Experts in language study offer several reasons for the administration's seeming indifference. President Bush's involvement in education is centered on the No Child Left Behind law, which itself has not been fully financed. Neoconservatives inside and outside government have assailed Middle East studies departments - the likely recipients of any increased federal money for advanced study of Arabic and related languages - for alleged bias against the United States and Israel. It is expensive and time-consuming to conduct security checks of Arab immigrants interested in serving as linguists.
"We can hope, but hope won't do it," said Richard Brecht, a former Air Force cryptographer who is executive director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Language, a joint project of the Defense Department and the University of Maryland based in College Park. "Five billion dollars for an F-22 will not help us in the battle against terrorism. Language that helps us understand why they're trying to harm us will."
