The United States doesn't need a lot of new grads to explain "why they hate us." What it needs are people who are so persuaded of its mission in the world that they are prepared to undergo some hardship and risk to advance it. I happen to think that calling that mission "empire" just gets in the way. But whatever the mission is called, its bearers have to be persuaded that it is the worthiest of causes. That demands cultural self-esteem and self-mastery—the true purpose of an elite education. It doesn't require a working knowledge of Arabic.

The reason Kramer gives his belief that Arabic isn't necessary, only "cultural self-esteem and self-mastery," is his usual one: Middle East Studies in America, dominated by unthinking acolytes of Edward Said, are "more likely to produce a human shield than a proconsul." He goes on to cite the example of Yale professor Dmitri Gutas, who argued against the US bombing the Taliban and al-Qaeda during Ramadan, and against the recent bombing of Baghdad, because of the cultural significance of both Ramadan and Baghdad. Persons "too knowledgeable in [Middle Eastern] ways and languages might see things rather too readily from their point of view. And knowledge, turned into sympathy, could paralyze." If the US is building an empire in the traditional sense as described by British historian Niall Ferguson in this essay (which Kramer is responding to in his blog), it need not be interested in learning the ways of the culture it is ruling over. As Ronny Heaslop in E.M. Forster's A Passage to India quipped, "We're not pleasant in India, and we don't intend to be pleasant. We've something more important to do."

Kramer has a point about Middle Eastern Studies in America; there needs to be more room within the academy for people like him, Fouad Ajami, and Daniel Pipes (peaceful co-existence with the others, I say). But he exaggerates, I think, the influence men like Joel Beinin, Rashid Khalidi, Gabriel Piterberg, et al. have on their students. We aren't automatons, you know. Not all of us swallow whole what our professors have to say. Kramer also exaggerates the extent to which learning Arabic will necessarily produce radical cultural relativists, and ignores the many benefits that accrue to someone with a knowledge of indigenous languages and cultures working within those cultures. He himself has benefitted from such understanding, after all. If you want to work in Middle Eastern affairs, you can't afford not to know Arabic! Languages are the foremost means towards accessing other cultures (a salient truth that, ironically, many multiculturalists tend to ignore). Even if your purpose is not understanding and scholarship but reform and control, you still need to understand what you're reforming and changing.

And mind you, "Empire" is not how I'd describe the US and UK's current endeavor. The current operation in Iraq cannot be equated with imperial enterprises of old, not without acknowledging the considerable differences between the two eras, the respective governments, and the rhetoric being employed now and then. Within the current framework, I'd say that cultural understanding is far more important than it was previously.