Since I attained some competence at a foreign language as an adult a few years ago, by "immersion", I can say that adults or even late adolescents won't attain native fluency crossing over from Persian to Arabic, or Pashtu, Dari, or other languages spoken in Afghanistan and Arabic for that matter. It just doesn't happen. But there will always be individuals who are bilingual for one reason or another, and it only takes a few of these types of people to organize some real disorder in a country in the state Iraq is in.
Arabic itself has regional dialects, and you can tell just by listening to the news that the variant spoken in Iraq is much more guttural than the variant from Saudi Arabia, and if I can hear that it must be as glaringly obvious as a Brooklyn accent versus a Boston accent to an arabic speaker. When the Mossad has had Arab speaking operatives, they have to find people who speak with the correct local accent on top of other difficulties. It is possible to find such people, just not everywhere.
But if one want's to organize and stir up trouble, I don't think native language fluency in Arabic is totally necessary. What is necessary is a population that will be receptive to their "talking points" and spin. That we can do something about by not fouling up in getting water, and other services going as fast as possible, and securing ammunition dumps placed cynically right next to civilian populated areas.
I do think a lot of the superficial media talk about all these foreign operatives in Iraq is scare talk. Just like the article I skimmed in the Boston Globe on Sunday, gleefully talking about how the Shi'ites were organizing a revolt against America, you could easily see where the reporter was coming from. The media loves to make you crazy with fear and anxiety, to sell more product like some kind of daily soap opera, and on top of the bias of reporters and editors. A lot can just be put on ignore, since we'll soon enough know how things will turn out, and participants in FADG don't have much chance of directly influencing much of anything anyway. |
