IRAQ’S RECONSTRUCTION poses challenges to American policymakers not seen since World War II. Hardest of all is the reshaping of Iraq’s political culture–that is, replacing the Baath party cult of enslavement and hate with liberal-democratic ideas. Iraqis have been fed Baathist ideology for 34 years. In school, they have been taught that the highest values are self-sacrifice for pan-Arab unity, loyalty to the dictator, and hatred of the United States and Israel. Saddam’s education system must now be razed and a new system built in its place. The first step is to understand the twisted thinking to which Iraqi children have been exposed. Baathism, the official ideology of Iraq since 1979 and of Syria since the 1960s, is not just a theory of interest to party intellectuals. Rather, it is a set of ideas meant to pervade the lives of the people, starting with the children. Schoolbooks in Iraq and Syria were intended not to educate but to destroy the individual, by capturing his mind, killing his soul, and turning his body into a tool of the state. The product of this education was conformist, without personal ambition, and reconciled to the dictator and his totalitarian state.
In Baathist textbooks, the state and the party are presented as one, and the leader is its embodiment. Loyalty to this father figure must override every other bond. In Syria, textbooks devoted to party indoctrination figure in the secondary-level curriculum. In Iraq, textbooks recruited students into a Baathist organization for children called the Vanguard as early as the third grade.
Baathist textbooks teach that a narrow understanding of nationality must be transcended. In its place they enshrine the romantic quest for a revolutionary, socialist, pan-Arab state stretching from the Arabian Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean. They teach that Arabs will recapture their place as the world’s leading civilization only if they are united. So much is unity the cornerstone of Baathist ideology that the party defines socialism as a struggle between the Arab masses and the opponents of Arab unity, rather than as a class struggle dividing the Arab nation. Although secular, the ideology propounded in Iraqi and Syrian schools is no less extreme or more hospitable to the West than Islamist fanaticism.
Given the centrality of the quest for Arab unity, the adversaries of the Arab world are a natural focus of the curriculum. These adversaries must be fought. Baathism is presented as antithetical to the West. In fact, Baathism defines Arab identity as a struggle against Western imperialism and colonialism. The Syrian education system teaches that the Zionist movement–second biggest enemy after the United States–was created by Western colonialists for the purpose of defeating and exploiting the Arab world. A Syrian eighth-grade social studies textbook explains that Zionism followed the rise of colonialism and the European states’ takeover of many of the lands of underdeveloped countries. It asserts that some rich Jews, together with the Western colonial powers, wanted to gather all Jews in Palestine, which, once it was settled and filled, would become the springboard for seizing and plundering the entire Arab nation.
Iraqi textbooks, according to an April 20 report in the New York Times, give an even longer list of the state’s adversaries. In addition to the “imperialist” United States and Zionism, they include Iran and NATO. As in Syria, tyranny is justified as the only means of protecting the people from colonialism. Dissent is rejected as treason, and revolt against the tyrant would leave the nation helpless before the designs of the colonialists. In other words, survival requires submission to the dictatorship. An Iraqi sixth-grade textbook quotes Saddam praising his Republican Guard as “the men for difficult missions,” such as “protecting the nation and defending it from Persian, American, NATO, and Zionist aggression.”
Both Iraqi and Syrian textbooks thus turn the language of freedom on its head. They brand as treasonous both individualism and limited government. Because Baathism regards colonialism as an imminent and pervasive threat, the schools must teach children that their main purpose in life is to defend their tyrannical regime, if necessary to the death. In Iraq, textbooks for sixth graders taught that all citizens were duty-bound to volunteer for the armed forces in order to “defend the nation and sacrifice for it.” This duty so dominated the lives of Iraqi citizens that children were taught not to value education highly and were discouraged from pursuing secondary or higher education. Iraqi textbooks emphasized that one could fulfill one’s duty to the state by volunteering for the armed forces with as little as an elementary education. Thus, the citizen’s ability to contribute to Iraqi society did not depend on his qualifications. It depended only on his willingness to die defending the regime.
Similarly, in Syria, although the state is secular, children are taught that it is their duty and highest purpose in life to wage jihad (holy war) and become martyrs in the service of the Baathist ideology. The Syrian state manipulates religion to ensure that the citizens are willing to die for its survival.
Syrian textbooks spell out the spiritual rewards awaiting martyrs in the hereafter, but they also note the material benefits to be delivered in this life. The textbooks teach that the late president Hafez Assad “believed in the [elevated] status of martyrs and provides their families with much attention.” A ninth-grade textbook explains that this presidential care led to the establishment of a special Syrian city called The City of the Martyrs’ Children, where children of martyrs “receive compensation for the motherly and fatherly love they have lost.”
In light of this indoctrination, it is not surprising that Arab volunteers from outside Iraq fought American forces alongside Saddam’s loyalists. Instead of rejoicing at the collapse of one of the world’s darkest dictatorships, these young volunteers, many of them from Syria, chose to defend Iraq in the name of pan-Arab nationalism. They chose glorified slavery over liberation. They could not countenance the defeat of a fellow Arab regime, no matter how brutal and despotic, by America. Like many in the Arab world, they couldn’t digest the shock of seeing liberated Iraqis welcoming Americans.
The biggest task Americans face in reforming the Iraqi education system is not to refurbish schoolrooms or round up capable teachers (Iraq has plenty), but to attend to the content of what is taught: especially to replace the instruction in hate and loyalty to the tyrant with lessons in the meaning of citizenship, the intrinsic value of the individual, and a new Iraqi nationalism hospitable to democratic ideas. This is as big a job as the one we faced after the defeat of Nazism in Europe. Education is the only means of causing the next generation of Iraqis to grow into free men and women. And that alone will bring lasting liberation to Iraq.
Meyrav Wurmser is the director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Hudson Institute.
