Creating Terrorists
I’m confused. I was assured that invading Iraq would only create more terrorists.
In two months of interviews with 40 young people in five Iraqi cities, a pattern of disenchantment emerged, in which young Iraqis, both poor and middle class, blamed clerics for the violence and the restrictions that have narrowed their lives.
“I hate Islam and all the clerics because they limit our freedom every day and their instruction became heavy over us,” said Sara, a high school student in Basra. “Most of the girls in my high school hate that Islamic people control the authority because they don’t deserve to be rulers.”
Atheer, a 19-year-old from a poor, heavily Shiite neighborhood in southern Baghdad, said: “The religion men are liars. Young people don’t believe them. Guys my age are not interested in religion anymore.”
The shift in Iraq runs counter to trends of rising religious practice among young people across much of the Middle East, where religion has replaced nationalism as a unifying ideology.
While religious extremists are admired by a number of young people in other parts of the Arab world, Iraq offers a test case of what could happen when extremist theories are applied. Fingers caught in the act of smoking were broken. Long hair was cut and force-fed to its wearer. In that laboratory, disillusionment with Islamic leaders took hold.
Let me get this straight. So an individual may claim to support an ideology but then when they are forced to live in that ideology withdraw their support. You don’t say. Really? Average people don’t like to live under austere religious conditions. Having to live in those conditions makes them antipathetic towards such fundamentalism.
And here I figured it would make them more fanatical. More like to join the ranks of Al Qaeda. Turns out freedom is the antidote to fanaticism. Well shucks. Who knew? Technically the conservatives did, but people on the left might have a hard time fessing up to that.
April 11th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
Good Iraq news in the New York Times, a rare treat.
It appears we only have to wait one more generation before violent Islamic fundamentalism is shaken out of Iraq, which could be worse i guess.
April 12th, 2008 at 5:05 am
Wasn’t Iraq already more secular than many of its neighbors even before the invasion? I think that is some indication that the fact that they “hate Islam” is not in itself sufficient to conclude that they are now the ‘good guys’.
April 12th, 2008 at 11:22 am
Good point dan. I forgot about that one. I still think iraq is creating less terrorists than predicted, but thanks for the perspective.
April 15th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Yeah, Iraq was a completely secular state under Saddam, because religious leaders would have threatened his power base. One of the nice things about totalitarian dictatorships is that their dissidents try to blow up their own government instead of ours. Of course then we have to tolerate totalitarian dictatorships, which is a moral problem.