The Few, the Proud, the Culturally Sensitive

The Marine Corps intelligence folks have been handing out a "Culture Smart Card" for everyone serving in Iraq to use as a guide to make friends and influence people.

The primer explains basic courtesies, such as: "Shake hands gently in greeting and departure, but always with your right hand. Respond to a woman's greeting only when she initiates the contact." Also, "don't point with a finger; it is a sign of contempt; instead, point with your entire hand."

The latest card, which came out in May -- they're issued every couple of years, we're told -- is so good that the section on "cultural groups" pretty much predicts the bloodshed of the past two months:

"Sunnis blame Shia for undermining the mythical unity of Islam and they view them as less loyal to Iraq. Shia blame Sunnis for marginalizing the Shia majority and resent Sunni attempts to question their loyalty to Iraq."

"Kurds are openly hostile toward Iraqi Arabs," the card says; they speak Kurdish, not Arabic, and they are "distrustful of the Turkoman, as they have competing claims over Kirkuk. The Assyrians experienced persecution by both Kurds and Arabs," while the Chaldeans "distrust both Kurdish and Arab intentions." Talk about a dysfunctional family.

But not to worry. The card gives key phrases you'll need to deal with this situation:

"Stop/awgaf; do not move/le tet-Harak; lower your hands/nezill eidayk; turn around/in-dar; drop your weapons/Dhib is-la-Hak" and finally "lie on your stomach/in-baT-aH."

Don't go on patrol without it.

Tuning In, Tuning Out

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Let's face it. These are not easy times for America's effort to make friends in the Middle East. The key media outlets in this campaign -- al-Hurra television and Radio Sawa -- are laboring hard.

But a recent survey of college students in the region -- done before Israel's re-invasion of Lebanon -- says U.S. policies on Israel and in Iraq are such that "these networks may be completely unable to change opinions on these two issues."

The survey, an unscientific sampling of attitudes of 394 university communications students in such places as Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Morocco, found that these young people listened to Radio Sawa's pop music, but there was "no significant relationship between the frequency of listening to Radio Sawa and favorability toward US foreign policy." The same held true for al-Hurra.

Worse yet, the more they listened, the less they liked us, according to the new study, "U.S. Public Diplomacy in the Arab World," published in the current Global Media and Communication. "One significant finding," said author Mohammed el-Nawawy of Queens University of Charlotte, "is that respondents' attitudes toward U.S. foreign policy have worsened slightly since their exposure to Radio Sawa and Television Alhurra."