Kirkuk Nearly Shook by One Word

Political interpreters must have one of the toughest jobs in the world. Even if one is perfectly bi- or tri-cultural, there is always regional nuance, new slang, mumbling, distraction, misquotation, Qaddafi. One particularly uncomfortable, if somehow laughable, recent blunder was when a well-meaning Congolese interpreter may have misinterpreted a French-speaking journalist's question as "What does Mr. [rather than Mrs] Clinton think..." and Secretary Clinton nearly tore his head off. Well, that's nothing.

This weekend in Iraq an interpreter made a slight error in a broadcast about the politically volatile election law in Kirkuk, a governorate shared - and disputed - by Kurds, Arabs, Turkomen and other groups, and nearly started yet another front in the war.

Massoud Barzani, President of the Kurdish Regional Government which represents at least half of the city of Kirkuk, said about discussions over the coming election law that he would not accept "special status" for the city. Instead, the interpretation from Kurdish to Arabic had him say the Kurds would "annex" Kirkuk. I'm sure a couple thousand Arabs in the audience choked on their tea. Fortunately, Kirkuk's residents have been much more patient than outsiders expected and the station corrected the error very quickly. But it does show that, paraphrasing from NBC's The West Wing, we're all just one bad falafel away from another crisis in the Middle East.

[Photo: Maurice A Galloway, US Army, Iraq.]