It may surprise many Americans to learn that five years after the 9/11 attacks, our 1,000-strong embassy in Baghdad has just six fluent speakers of Arabic.

This statistic from the Iraq Study Group report signals not simply a shortcoming of our prosecution of the war in Iraq, but also a major failure of our foreign policy performance for at least a half-century. It is way past time to address the parochialism that has resulted from our national inclination toward isolationism.

The Iraq conflict, like our experience in Vietnam a generation ago, confirms that we cannot win cultural wars with armed force alone. We must also address the economic, political, educational and social  forces on which victory depends as much as, if not more than, military might.

The United States has not initiated nor even proposed a program for  dealing with those cultural forces; indeed, the overreactions of INS and Homeland Security since 9/11 have greatly reduced the ability of  international students to study in the United States.

Language study receives little federal support at any level of education. Fewer than 2 percent of American college graduates study abroad and even fewer are fluent in any language other than English.

If the United States is to assert and defend its interests abroad, it must develop and deliver cultural education and training worthy of a world power. The good news is that the apparatus for doing so - the world's finest network of colleges and universities - is already in place and almost universally committed to the value of study abroad, language training and understanding the politics, economies and  culture of other countries.

What is needed is the national focus and support that got us to the moon in less than a decade: a mandate - and the modest resources required to carry it out - that this country develop the linguistic and cultural expertise worthy of a great power in an era of global conflict and globalized insurgency.

The American military won the Iraq war in a matter of days; we have been losing the peace ever since, largely because of our lack of cultural resources and expertise. Our understanding of the manifold complexities of Iraqi society was, and is, profoundly inadequate.

It doesn't need to be: Academic support for the war effort can be pivotal, as it was during World War II. That connection, ruptured during the 1960s, can be restored with the proper leadership.

Newt Gingrich, historian and former speaker of the U.S. House, said recently that the U.S. Department of State needs to be twice as large as it is to address challenges around the world in the decades to come. He may be right, but in order to have a Department of State that is not simply larger, but significantly more professionalized and effective, the equivalent of a domestic Marshall Plan for cultural education should be a national priority.