IRAQIS REBUILDING COUNTRY FROM THEIR CHILDREN UP

Saturday, April 26, 2003

Establishing a functioning government in Iraq is a top priority, and it's an encouraging sign that local councils are emerging spontaneously in some cities, including Umm Qasr, where citizen volunteers are working with British troops to restore utilities and with American Seabees to renovate a school.

But almost as high on the priority list is rebuilding the Iraqi education system, removing propaganda exalting Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party ideology, and ensuring that the next generation of Iraqi children are educated to take their places as citizens of a free and democratic Iraq.

The United States Agency for International Development has awarded Creative Associates International Inc., of Washington, D.C., a $62 million contract to make sure that there are classrooms, teachers and school supplies for 4 million children by the time schools open in September. It's a huge task, because the schools have been badly neglected since sanctions were imposed after the 1991 Gulf war. Most need repair, and as coalition troops discovered, many have been used for weapons depots.

The original plan was to provide a curriculum and textbooks, as the company is doing in Afghanistan, but Iraqis working with the project objected. ``It's not up to the Americans to dictate to Iraqi students what to study,'' one told The Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper.

Well, not in detail, perhaps, but we will have something to say about it. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, in answer to a question about the possibility of an Iranian-style theocracy in Iraq, ``That's not going to happen.'' When bidders compete for the contracts to produce new textbooks, they will have to be secular and nonpolitical.

``Clearly, we want to remove a lot of the hatred and intolerance perpetuated through textbooks for children as young as 7 or 8,'' Ellen Yount, a spokeswoman for USAID, told the Telegraph.

Of course the idea that schooling should be nonpolitical is itself a political principle. But there are some political principles that are vital to a free society, and that's one of them. The U.S. has an interest in ensuring that children aren't learning from books that proclaim ``Love Saddam, hate America!'' It has no need to replace them with books praising America.

The extent of indoctrination in Saddam's schools is difficult to imagine, even though we've seen it in other totalitarian societies.

Children as young as 5 were recruited for any number of paramilitary groups, trained in the use of weapons, taught to denounce their families and friends -- and, sometimes, sent to jail for being insufficiently enthusiastic about the curriculum.

Phebe Marr, who wrote The Modern History of Iraq, described the Saddam curriculum to The Washington Post. Textbooks are suffused with violence; one civics text asks sixth-graders to find a picture from the Gulf War of ``our army as they plunge into the noble battle against . . . the imperialist American attack.''

Children learn that Iraq's greatest enemies are Iranians, Zionists and Americans. ``We're the aggressors,'' Marr said.

An Iraqi exile, Zainab al-Suwaij, told the Reuters news agency that as a child in school she would be given pro-Saddam banners and sent to the streets to participate in rallies supporting Sad- dam. ``If we tried to escape from these demonstrations, they would whip us.''

All this indoctrination works, up to a point. Many of the Fedayeen who fought coalition troops were recruited from the children's paramilitaries. And they were joined by fighters from other Arab countries, trained in schools every bit as rigidly ideological although the ideology was Islamic fascism rather than Baathist fascism. More broadly still, the ideological textbooks used by the Palestine Authority bear much of the responsibility for the continuing violence in the West Bank and Israel. One of the requirements of the Oslo ``peace'' process was that textbooks would be revised to recognize the existence of Israel and its right to exist, but that hasn't happened.

Still, reality has a certain educational value. The fall of Baghdad and the collapse of the Iraqi regime, live on television, stunned Arab viewers who were utterly unprepared for what they were seeing. Willfully miseducated by ideologues, consistently lied to by government-controlled media, many of them believed the Iraqi Minister of Information right up until the day he disappeared from television to become a mythological figure of ridicule on the Internet.

Iraqis who bore the painful reality of their society seem eager to change it for the better. They are starting with the children.