Today’s Must Read

If ever there was an awful epitaph for the Iraq war, it’s surely this: “Staying here is like committing suicide.” That’s a quote from a 25-year old Iraqi medical student, summing up the way many of his college-educated peers feel about their country. According to a harrowing story in today’s New York Times, many college graduates are fleeing the country, joining the four million Iraqis estimated to have either abandoned the country or become internally displaced. (pdf.) As the Times explains, it’s a decision that further hollows out the educated middle class necessary for a nation’s ultimate prosperity:

The class of 2007 came of age during a transformation that according to students has harvested tragedy from seeds of hope. They are the last remnants of a middle class that has already fled by the tens of thousands. As such they embody the country’s progression from innocence to bitter wisdom amid dashed expectations and growing animosity toward the Americans.

They said would leave their country feeling betrayed, by the debilitating violence that has killed scores of professors and friends, by the growing influence of Islamic fundamentalism and by the Americans, who they say cracked open their country, releasing spasms of violence without protecting the moderate institutions that could have been a bulwark against extremism.

One student, a Shiite Turkmen law student studying in Kirkuk, Abdul Hassein Ibrahim Zain Alabidin, judiciously remarks about the Americans, “I want to tell them thanks for liberating us, but enough with the mistakes.” He tells reporter Damien Cave, “I blame Saddam because he sold Iraq and was behind the coming of the occupiers. … I blame the American administration for its mistakes in dealing with Iraqis.” Others have similarly bleak assessments:

[Baghdad University student Hasan] Haitham, wiry and soft-spoken, with sensitive eyes, enrolled at Mosul University but transferred to be closer to his family. In Mosul, he said, his car was shot full of holes on his way to and from class. Baghdad is not much better, he said: on some days his mother has seen bodies in the road seconds after dropping him off.

“I had a plan one day to have a wife and kids and my own dental clinic,” he said. “They were good dreams. They’re gone.”

With bombs exploding in students’ lockers during packed class sessions, it’s a testament to the fortitude of Haitham and his classmates that they’ve stayed in Iraq as long as they have. In March, the chief of police for western Baghdad told me that the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s resulted in the psychological decimation of a generation of young Iraqis. Today’s story suggests that the next generation will suffer the same fate.