Americans and Foreign Language Skills

I happened to watch again the Movie, the "Bourne Identity", whose main charactor is this super trained American CIA Spy machine. A very unrealistic depiction of a CIA operative if you ask me . They are mostly analytic geeks that spend most of their time on computers. We used to see a few field agents in Mexico but they always stick out like sour thumbs. Everybody knew who they were. This guy(played by Matt Damon) is really tough and can do almost anything including making himself understood in many different foreign languages. As a long time expatriate American, I find the language skill part of the character very unrealistic. Americans are not in anyway skilled language learners from my own personal experience. Here in Mexico, I have known some Americans that have also lived here for ten years and they still can't get past "buenos dias". It's an embarrassment because nearly every 8 year old street kid here can make himself understood in English.
I think this is the biggest barrier to success in America's War on Terror, It's war on Drugs, and its Wars even with itself. Why is is so hard? Why is it so much easier for everybody else to learn English? Maybe that's one of the keys to the mystery. Why should we learn anything that difficult, when we can make everybody else learn English? (The dittohead mentality)
For the cost of every soldier we send to Afghanistan we could pay a 1000 children to learn Arabic from childhood. We could make the classes easy and fun for the children, instead of the children dreading language classes like they do now. But learning a foreign language is not something you can buy at Walmart and take home in a plastic bag. So it must be very valuable indeed if no amount of money can buy it.
Here is what I think the real reason is that Americans can't learn a foreign language. You can fake your way through Math, English, and History classes and graduate from high school. You can even fake your way through life. But you can't fake your way through language class, because if you didn't study the material, you risk making a fool of yourself, because 90% of language class is verbal. You either know it or you don't. You either studied it or you didn't. The student can't hide from his lack of dedication in language class.
They say World War 2 was won by cracking the German communication codes. It had to have been the British who accomplished this, because from my point of view, this is a fundamental weakness inherent in our society that goes way back needs to be addressed if the US is going to continue as the world's only superpower. And I don't think the answer is to continue to move the people to the US to lower the tensions abroad. Some of us should go abroad ourselves and spread the positive contributions the US can make in the future to the world.
I have become a big fan of this new age Mexican Cinema. They are really making some good movies down here these days. What disturbs me about them sometimes is, that if there is an American Character depicted in the Movie, he is stereotyped as either a conniving Alcoholic chasing the young women, or a religious zealot invading Mexico like some ladder day Moses trying to liberate Mexican Catholics with some form of Brand X christianism. That's how the Mexican Filmmakers see us. In other words, they don't ever meet anyone else who might have some kind of other purpose. This disturbs me because if Mexicans were typecast this way in American Films it wouldn't be politically correct, but in this case, there is no backlash, because I'm the only one who has the language skills to notice. Good luck with that super power thing.