For Iraqi Students, Hussein's Arrival Is End of History

For Iraqi Students, Hussein's Arrival Is End of History: "By Jonathan Finer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, April 15, 2006; Page A01

BAGHDAD -- The two-year-old modern history textbook used at Baghdad's Mansour High School for Boys doesn't mention the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq in 2003.

There's not a word about Iraq's annexation of -- and subsequent expulsion from -- Kuwait in 1990 and 1991, or its grinding eight-year war with Iran in the 1980s that took the lives of a generation of young men.

Perhaps most conspicuously absent from the book, earlier versions of which were packed with florid praise for Hussein, is any reference to the former dictator. For the purposes of instruction at Mansour High, and most schools across Iraq, history ends in 1968, before the bloodless coup that swept the Baath Party to power.

U.S.-sponsored reconstruction efforts have renovated or rebuilt nearly 3,000 Iraqi schools, retrained 55,000 teachers and administrators and -- under the supervision of the government's de-Baathification commission -- revised or redacted millions of textbooks that glorified 35 years of tyrannical rule. Dozens of schools named for Hussein were reflagged, and once-mandatory courses in nationalism and Baathist ideology were scrapped."