Words of War: The Iraqi Tower of Babel

This paper surveys the linguistic aspects of the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq’s multilingual society, focusing first on the multilingual character of Iraqi society and the Arabic, Kurdish, and other languages spoken in this rapidly changing society. Discussion then moves to an examination of the inherent difficulties in working across an English-Arabic ⁄ Kurdish divide and concludes by discussing the puzzling inability of the American government to grapple effectively with the linguistic challenges of political and military operations in the Middle East.