I’ve corresponded with Dave at The Glittering Eye, and I can confirm he knows a thing or two about languages. Which makes his observations about Arabic speakers, and the ramifications he suggests, worth considering.

First, the adult literacy rate of 64 percent claimed for the Arab world, as low as that looks, probably is actually an overstatement. The Arab core of the Islamic world, including Iraq, is a powerful oral linguistic culture. That’s not a put-down, by any means. The ancient Greeks, among others, had such a linguistic culture, and their achievements were world-altering.

But it does make a difference when you try to talk to such a community, as Dave says:

The Bush Administration has made bringing democracy to Iraq a keystone of its policy in the War on Terror. This would be a formidable task under any circumstances but a major complication is the oral or vestigial oral nature of the culture. When the United States began its own experiment with democracy the literacy in the adult population in New England is estimated at around 90% (somewhat lower in the rest of the new country although statistics are very hard to come by).

I’m not saying, by the way, that orality means that democracy is impossible. I believe, along with Mr. Bush, that all people aspire to freedom. But communicating effectively with the people and making freedom part of the prevailing wisdom in the society requires using modalities of communication that are meaningful to the people.

Mr. Bush or his surrogates should speak directly to the Iraqi people frequently on radio or television. The speeches should be repetitive and should use stock phrases. The translation should actively employ constructions that have resonance in Arabic even at the expense of literal meaning. Abstractions e.g. freedom, democracy should be avoided in favor of concrete examples of the exercises of freedom and democracy. The speeches should be aggressive, energetic, and argumentative rather than conciliatory or temperate. Hardest of all, liberal democracy should be sold using an appeal to traditional values. The early Jesuit missionaries to China had considerable success in converting the Chinese to Christianity by reinterpreting the gospels in traditional Chinese terms i.e. Jesus as a sage and a similar approach should be used in the conversion of Iraq to liberal democracy.

I recall a radio interview of columnist Thomas Friedman in 2002 or early 2003 in which he was discussing the hazards of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. He characterized one of the possibilities as “Surprise! You’re the new Saddam Hussein.â€Â? I doubt that this is what he meant but if the style and approach above sound at all familiar they shouldâ€â€?they’re how Saddam Hussein spoke to the Iraqi people. He understood how to communicate with them effectively.

What often is overlooked in America’s successful experiments in exporting democracy — notably to Germany and Japan — is how it succeeded best when the transmitters didn’t confuse “America” with “democracy” and allowed the essential democratic ideals to be presented by the occupiers in the linguistic and cultural frameworks of the local peoples.

The American effort in postwar Germany, for instance, benefitted from the fact that, in four years of warfare, a team of German-speaking émigré intellectuals had come together in the U.S. Army. Many were Jewish, and many had lived in America for decades. But largely they loved and understood Germany, and when they went back there after the fall of Hitler, they were home again. In 1945 as these émigrés set up the Neue Zeitung, western Germany’s first national newspaper in the wake of Hitler’s defeat, they made it a German newspaper. They believed that reeducation could not consist solely of familiarizing Germans with American culture and showing them the advantages of democracy. Instead, they packaged American culture and democratic ideas in the context of German highbrow Kultur, and rather subversively emphasized core democratic values, such as tolerance and individualism, to their German readers.