"They Want Ignorance to Rule So They Can Have Control"

The "Education President" strikes again. If the youth of Iraq have one thing to cling to, it would be the prospects of a good education for themselves. And now, even that possibility is beginning to crumble.

Iraqi Students Fear Death of Education System

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Maha Nidal's voice is tinged with bitterness and sorrow as she looks around the campus courtyard at her fellow students milling around. The sight is a blend of Iraq's various religious sects --some girls in headscarves, others looking like they walked out of the pages of a fashion magazine.

"The future? The future is a dream. We only live in the now. There is no future," the 21-year-old student says.

This university, with its sprawling green campus, once was abuzz with activity. Now it is covered in the layer of grime and dust that seems to blanket all of Baghdad.

Like most of the students at Baghdad University, Maha lives in fear. But now, after the mass kidnapping at the Ministry of Higher Education this week, she lives not only in fear of the violence, but in fear of losing the one thing that will determine her future -- her education. (Watch Maha describe the lack of hope Iraqi students have -- 2:17 Video)

When she heard that the education ministry was thinking of shutting down the university, her world -- already shattered -- crumbled.

"You can't imagine what we felt, I saw our future destroyed," she says. "How do you know that a future of a country ... has been destroyed? It's when there is no justice, no security, and no education, if you reach the stage of no studies and no education. And when you lose that, that's it, the people are finished.

"There is no future."

[...]

One does not have to look further than the empty hallways and deserted classrooms to see the toll that the violence is taking on Iraq's educated moderate minds. The students say that on a good day, 40 percent of their classmates show up. More often than not, their professors are not around. Most of the senior professors have fled the country or have been killed.

"The head of my department was killed last year," Maha says. "Gunmen came to his house and killed him. And that was hard for us. He was like one of the students; he kept us strong."

He also gave her hope.

Many of the students here are aware that extremist elements want to divide Iraqi society and drive out secular moderates.

"This is what they want -- the gunmen, the terrorists, any force right now with its hands in destruction wants this -- no education," Maha says. "No learning, no future, for ignorance to rule so that they can have control."

The impact of the academic destruction, as one Iraqi education official put it, could kill this struggling nation.

You'll definitely want to watch the video.

So, everything that could possibly bring "freedom" to Iraq is being systematically destroyed. If you're not being shot in the street, you're losing the possibility of building a future for yourself with higher education. It's becoming more and more obvious that Bush's idea of "freedom" rests on a "free election" or two, it has nothing to do with infrastructure, protection, or education. The idea that a man who made it into Yale due to his family name, and then systematically pissed away his higher education, could then go on to destroy the educational future of thousands of people is maddening.

(What do you do with a drunken cross-post?)