Abu Guh Boo Boo

Those who know me are aware that I’ve never had particularly high expectations of the current administration, but just when I thought Mr. Bush could sink no lower, he somehow succeeded in letting just a bit more water out of the pool. I’m referring to last night’s rather uninteresting speech at the Army War College in which Mr. Bush attempted to convince a skeptical U.S. and an even more skeptical Iraq that he did, in fact, have something resembling a plan for getting U.S. troops out of there before the next millennium.

I’ll leave discussion of the finer points of the speech to the political pundits, but I can’t help but comment on Mr. Bush’s almost comical attempts to pronounce the name of the prison at the center of the recent abuse scandals: Abu Ghraib. As any social anthropologist will tell you, one of the hallmarks of a society that views itself as superior to everyone else is its complete lack of interest in attempting to pronounce foreign words and names in any manner remotely approaching the “native” pronunciation. Certainly this strategy was exploited to great effect by the colonial Brits during their empire-building phase, who to this day still make no attempt to pronounce French (or any other language) properly.

Now, I would have thought that if there were any single phrase in the Monday speech that Mr. Bush would have attempted to get right, it would be “Abu Ghraib,” if only to demonstrate that he was more than passingly familiar with the notorious prison. I wasn’t expecting him to pronounce it as an Arabic speaker would (where the second word would come out something like a very guttural “GHRebb”); I was fully prepared to settle, albeit wincingly, for the sanitized Newspeak version (“Abu GRABE”) that one commonly hears on television and radio.

But instead, the first time Mr. Bush came across the name, the best he could squeak out was an embarrassingly halting “Abooguh . . . rape.” Not to worry—he had two more chances coming up. The second time, Mr. Bush more bravely gave us “Abooguh-RONE.” Well, better—but still not quite. On his last attempt, Mr. Bush almost got there with “Abu Guh-RAH.” (Rah, indeed!)

The more important point is that Mr. Bush looked very much like a man who’d never seen this name before. I’m sure that’s not the case, but it would have certainly helped our standing in the Arab world if he’d looked more like someone who knew what was going on, and less like a detached, uninterested mouthpiece vomiting out a speech he didn’t even understand.