Farsi. That's Farsi

In Maureen Dowd's otherwise excellent column Wednesday there's this line:

Even after the Iranian hostage crisis, America never really tried to comprehend the tribal politics in Iran — or Iraq — or bolster the Arab speakers in the intelligence community.

The Iranians don't speak Arabic. They don't even speak a Semitic language related to Arabic. They speak Farsi - an Indo-European language, also known as Persian.

She's right that we've never tried to understand Iran. Or the rest of the region, for that matter. And not even grasping that the Arabs, the Kurds, and the Iranians - and the Turks, too, for that matter - are different ethnicities, speaking different languages and having different histories, is just one dimension of that lack of understanding.