Can’t pronounce it? Let’s go and invade it

The failure to pronounce properly the names of places where the US has sent troops and tried to take charge is symptomatic of historical failures going back at least as far as Vietnam.

In Vietnam, the pronunciations always seemed to have a sort of US Southern twang to them. This may have been because President Johnson was a Texan and so many of the US military were from the South. Vietnamese places sounded like music scores, body parts or automobile parts: ‘‘Kan-toe,’’ ‘‘My Toe,’’ and ‘‘Cam-ran.’’

In the early 1980s, US military advisers appeared in Lebanon, along with a contingent of US Marines. Many of the advisers were veterans of Vietnam, and place names in Lebanon were inflicted by the twang. So, Choueifat, a suburb of Beirut, was called something like ‘‘chewy-fat.’’ The home of the Lebanese president was correctly pronounced Ba’ab-dah, but in the US military vernacular, it became ‘‘bob-duh.’’ The Lebanese military headquarters at Yarzeh was ‘‘Yarzee.’’

Hardly any of the US group in Lebanon seemed to speak Arabic, or to comprehend Lebanon’s history or politics. They were there mostly because the Israelis had invaded Lebanon, occupied Beirut with the help of Lebanese Christian militias and had left the US in a dangerous position.

The American mission seemed obsessed with restoring a sort of status quo ante in which Christian dominance in Lebanon would be restored, a peace treaty between Israel and Lebanon would be signed and the Lebanese army, in tatters after a decade of civil war, would be restored with greater sectarian balance among the Christians, Sunni and Shiite Muslims and the Druze. Secretary of State George P. Shultz actually got the Christian-dominated Lebanese to sign a peace agreement with Israel in May 1983, but Shultz hadn’t bothered to consult Syria. So, the agreement was stillborn.

Five months later, a suicide truck bomber killed 241 Americans at the Marine barracks in Beirut. The Marines were gone within a few months. The US advisers hung around a while longer, but the Lebanese army never became a formidable force in Lebanon.

Today, Syria runs Lebanon, an occupation the US effectively sanctioned after Syria joined the coalition against Iraq in the Gulf war. Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed, Syrian-condoned militia, runs South Lebanon. Hezbollah masterminded that attack on the Marine barracks in 1983.

This was not what Americans had in mind for Lebanon when the Reagan administration committed to the country. What they did have in mind was naive, to say the least, and fatal.

Iraq is similar to Lebanon in some disturbing ways, apart from the Bush administration’s apparent inability to even pronounce the name of the country correctly. The US oil industry was intimately involved with Iraq for decades. America has fought a war against Iraq. Saddam Hussein has been a prominent American headache ever since. Intelligence-gathering and war-making resources are infinitely more sophisticated than they were four decades ago.

Still, like Lebanon, there are complicate factions in Iraq whose behaviour in the event of an attack is wholly unpredictable. The Kurds in the north, the very people against whom Hussein used chemical weapons, are getting along quite well as the conduit for much of Iraq’s smuggled oil.

The south is predominantly Shiite, a historically repressed and impoverished part of the population with strong ties to neighbouring Shiite Iran. In the centre are the Sunni Muslims estimated to be about 34% of Iraq’s population, compared to a little more than 60% who are Shiite.

One very important element exists in the Iraqi calculation that did not exist in Lebanon or Vietnam: Iraq’s vast oil resources raise the stakes enormously and dangerously.

And if it looks to any of them as if the American occupiers are controlling the oil for their own profit, or for the profit of one part of the population over another, expect lethal consequences.

It’s good that the talk of war and occupation has stalled a little: more time to learn the language, and to understand the potentially fatal nuances. Better still, maybe an invasion and a long occupation won’t be necessary at all.

(LA Times-Washington Post)