Iraq and Afghanistan

Friedman’s Op-Ed in yesterday's Times offers an interesting hypothesis on the origin (or at least one origin) of the suicide bombers, of which there seems to be an endless supply in Iraq. He sees the problem beginning with the terrors of the Saddam regime, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War, and then the ten years of economic decline under Western sanctions in the 1990s. Iraq went from being the country with the most developed middle class in the region to a country of unemployed, without hope, a country from which the middle class and opportunity had essentially emigrated. The result was that when we attacked, we were faced with an already deeply humiliated and hopeless population, one who young people in their desperation had in many cases turned to extremist religious movements, either Shi'a or Sunni. He points out that unlike the situation in Palestine, these bombers commit suicide anonymously, indicating to him the extremity of their desperation. Our worst intelligence failure in his mind is the failure to understand this development in the minds of the people that we attacked. It suggests the complexity of understanding either friends or foes, a complexity that goes far beyond "understanding the culture" in the sense that this understanding is imparted in graduate schools.