I managed to watch some of Al-Jazeera’s coverage of the trial of Saddam Hussein. While he was in power, it was known that he was a semi-literate thug, albeit an exceptionally cunning one. He was reportedly frustrated by his inability to converse with other members of the Iraqi elite on equal terms because he couldn’t speak grammatically. This was certainly on full display today. It is hard to say how it would have sounded to a native speaker, but I thought that he came across as mentally dishevelled, using lots of non-standard Arabic vocabulary. This would be highly abnormal for an educated Arab in this context.

Al-Jazeera also showed these really pathetic, forelorn-looking shots of Saddam’s co-defendants in the dock. These men of power in the former regime looked like they didn’t know where they were. Al-Jazeera immediately then went to two interviews, one a defense lawyer for Saddam in Baghdad who went on and on about the illegitimacy of the trial of sayyid al-ra’is (Mr. President). They then shifted to an interview with an attorney in Amman, Jordan with something called “Organization for the Defense of Saddam Hussein” or something like that, and he said the same thing. They then showed pictures of crowds in Tikrit carrying Saddam’s picture, and then interviewed a young man there who criticized the trial. They then went to a commercial break, and then came back and interviewed a spokesman for the State Department, speaking in English with a translator, who just went over the standard boilerplate “This is another important step…” So it was basically Saddam the Arab Champion v. America, like in the 1990s, except now Saddam is the underdog. Sort of an Arab nationalist equivalent to Rocky V.

I couldn’t handle any more so I switched to Sawt Lubnan (The Voice of Lebanon) to listen to their daily broadcast (they have a 25-30 min. recording each day). It was refreshing; one of the briefs included a Lebanese activist railing against Syria’s stooges in the country, including President Emil Lahoud, who she called on to admit his “culpability” in the murder of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri.

As an aside, the State Dept. spokesman speaking in English, Adam Early, is someone who I have heard speak Arabic before and he sounded okay, but I guess that he felt he couldn’t express himself fully and so used a translater (or was instructed to do so by his boss). I have to say that it is pretty lame for the State Department, four years after 9/11, not to have people who are genuinely fluent in Arabic and can speak lucidly without translation; imagine if every foreigner who came to America used a translator, what kind of attention they would get. I’m not saying this to down Mr. Early, I know as well as anyone how hard Arabic is to learn, and my own speaking ability isn’t entirely fluent either, but then again I’m not a spokesman for the U.S. State Department, and their resources are certainly sufficient for them to send people to live in an Arab country as long as it takes to become fluent. I mean, it isn’t like Arabic is an unimportant language or something. There are only 22 countries for which it is an official language, and a few of those are important to U.S. foriegn policy as I recall.

Kirk H. Sowell, Arab World Analysis.com