WP op-ed: Jihad: Generational phenomenon that will burn itself out?

[DeepModem Mom]

Young Anger Foments Jihad
By David Ignatius
Wednesday, September 13, 2006; Page A17

.... I spent the hours before Bush's (9/11) speech moderating a discussion of the meaning of Sept. 11, which was hosted by the World Affairs Council here. One of the panelists was Marc Sageman, a man who comes to these issues with an unusual background -- he was a CIA case officer in Pakistan and then became a psychiatrist....Sageman argues in his book, "Understanding Terror Networks," that we are facing something closer to a cult network than an organized global adversary. Like many cults through history, the Muslim terrorists thrive by channeling and perverting the idealism of young people. As a forensic psychiatrist, he analyzed data on about 400 jihadists. He found that they weren't poor, desperate sociopaths but restless young men who found identity by joining the terrorist underground. Ninety percent came from intact families; 63 percent had gone to college; 75 percent were professionals or semi-professionals; 73 percent were married.

What transformed these young Sunni Muslim men was the fellowship of the jihad and the militant role models they found in people such as Osama bin Laden. The terrorist training camps in Afghanistan were a kind of elite finishing school --

Sageman likened it to getting into Harvard. The Sept. 11 hijackers weren't psychotic killers; none of the 19 had criminal records. In terms of their psychological profiles, says Sageman, they were as healthy as the general population.

The implication of Sageman's analysis is that the Sunni jihadism of al-Qaeda and its spinoff groups is a generational phenomenon. Unless new grievances spawn new recruits, it will gradually ebb over time. In other words, this is a fire that will gradually burn itself out unless we keep pumping in more oxygen. Nothing in Sageman's analysis implies that America should be any less aggressive in defending itself against terrorism. But he does argue that we should choose our offensive battles wisely and avoid glamorizing the jihadist network further through our rhetoric or actions.

Sageman's focus on the generational arc of violence got me thinking about my recent trip to Iran. The revolutionary intensity hasn't disappeared there, but it is certainly further down the curve than is the Sunni world. When I attended Friday prayers at Tehran University, I was struck by how old the people shouting "death to America" were. I would guess the average age was well over 40. The generation of the Iranian revolution is getting long in the tooth....There's another small detail about Iran that strikes me as relevant, now that I'm back home. As I explained in an earlier column, Tehran is a city of crazy drivers who nearly collide at every intersection. But the police are quite strict about requiring seat belts -- something I don't often see in the Muslim world....Now I submit to you: A nation that is wearing seat belts is probably not a mortal enemy of the United States....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/12/AR2006091201298.html