Well, they might just want to drop that talking point.
BAGHDAD — Iraq's schools, long touted by American officials as a success story in a land short on successes, increasingly are being caught in the crossfire of the country's escalating civil war.And what happens when you have a country filling with uneducated, terrified young people, who see no future prospects for themselves?
President Bush has routinely talked about the refurbishment and construction of schools as a neglected story of progress in Iraq. The U.S. Agency for International Development has spent about $100 million on Iraq's education system and cites the rehabilitation of 2,962 school buildings as a signal accomplishment.
But today, across the country, campuses are being shuttered, students and teachers driven from their classrooms and parents left to worry that a generation of traumatized children will go without education.
Teachers tell of students kidnapped on their way to school, mortar rounds landing on or near campuses and educators shot in front of children.
This month insurgents distributed pamphlets at campuses, some sealed inside an envelope with an AK-47 bullet.
"To the Honest People of Baghdad," one pamphlet read, "we want you to leave the schools, hospitals, institutes, colleges and universities until the illegal government of [Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri] Maliki is put down. We want your full cooperation on this."
No credible current national school attendance statistics exist in Iraq, whose education system was once considered a model in the Arab world. But examples abound of schools being closed or left mostly empty as parents flee the country or keep their children home.
But the scale of the violence is such that public places — squares, gas station lines, open-air markets and schools — have become killing zonesWhat happens when they are taught, from the earliest ages imaginable, that America is responsible for this?
Education Ministry officials have done little to secure Baghdad's schools. Officials said that school guards are not allowed to carry arms, and in at least one case, a guard was slain by gunmen.
At one elementary school in Mansour, a neighborhood of large homes once known for good schools and relatively little violence, the principal scoffed at an unarmed guard the ministry had dispatched after the campus was threatened.
"What is he going to do? We even started to make jokes about him," said the principal, who spoke on condition her name not be used. "When a gang of armed men come, he will start screaming: 'Here's the principal! Kill her!' "
The principal, a woman in her early 30s, said she had started bringing a revolver to work. "I cannot risk being kidnapped," she said apologetically.
When the school year began this fall, six students showed up, she said. But attendance gradually picked up. Then the principal received a series of anonymous threats on her cellphone.
"A man said we should close the school, otherwise they will come and bring the school down on our heads," she said.
What happens when they grow up and they're able to use weapons?
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