Maybe They'll Just Go Away

David Ignatius cites psychiatrist and former CIA case officer Marc Sageman on Islamist terrorism being, well, a demographic problem:

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...

Ignatius, who unlike me has recently returned from Iran, looks around and sees a cooling of revolutionary fervor, with most of the anti-American screamers belonging to the older generation. He sees police with radar guns and strict seat-belt rules and jokingly observes Now I submit to you: A nation that is wearing seat belts is probably not a mortal enemy of the United States.

But one of the standard critiques of Iran is that there's a split between the millions of young Iranians favorably disposed towards the U.S. and a ruling elite with crazed Holocaust-denying leaders like Ahmadinejad, funding Hamas, operating as a global safe house for terrorists, and hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons. It doesn't make sense to talk about "a nation" in this context.

And the Islamic revolution that deposed the Shah of Iran took place in what, 1979? Twenty-seven years later, Ignatius sees the fervor cooling. Now that we're in the middle of a new Islamist jihad-crazed eruption, I don't think we can wait that long for everyone to calm down.

Comments

[Donald R.McClarey]

Rather than lose power, the mullahs who run Iran and their secular supporters would bury half of the Iranian population. In order to spread the Islamic revolution throughout the Islamic world they would be more than willing to ignite a nuclear holocaust in their country by launching a nuclear attack on Israel. Most westerners in elite circles have never understood the Iranian regime, and this failure of imagination will prove fatal to millions of people.