"The Next Jihadists - Iraq's Lost Children"

If you want to get good and depressed, read this Newsweek cover story (it's from January, but I just read it recently) about the children in Iraq. It's like we helped turn an entire country into an Ameican urban ghetto - full of angry, hopeless (and well-armed) young men.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16610767/site/newsweek/

Newsweek
Jan. 22, 2007 issue
The Next Jihadists
By Christian Caryl
[. . .]
Sectarian warfare is reshaping Iraq in all sorts of malevolent ways day in and day out. But it is also forging the future by poisoning the next generation of Iraqis. Like many of its neighbors, Iraq is a young country: nearly half the population is under the age of 18. And those children have had a particularly turbulent upbringing. Kids like Ammar were born in the aftermath of one debilitating war, against neighboring Iran, then suffered two others and years of impoverishing sanctions in between. They are especially vulnerable to the demons that now grip Iraq. Hassan Ali, a sociologist at the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, estimates that at least 1 million Iraqi kids have seen their lives damaged by the war—they've lost parents and homes, watched as their communities have been torn apart by sectarian furies. "These children will come to believe in the principles of force and violence," says Ali. "There's no question that society as a whole is going to feel the effects in the future"—and not only Iraqi society. From the Middle East to Europe to America, violence may well beget violence around the world for years to come.