'Children of Jihad' Author Hits at Misconceptions about Middle-East

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, Dec. 21, 2007 — -- Jared Cohen, a 25-year-old Connecticut native, is part of the State Department Policy Planning Staff, a high-level squad of advisers to Condoleezza Rice. He recently spoke to ABC News about his travels in the Middle East, hanging out with Hizbollah, going to synagogue in Iran, and what he hopes to achieve with his new book, "Children of Jihad" (Penguin Books).

ABC NEWS: When did your travels begin and end?

JARED COHEN: I took my first trip to the Middle East in December 2004, and then would travel back and forth for two years while I was in graduate school. Then I joined the U.S. government in September 2006, and now I travel to the Middle East all the time — it's just a much safer version of what I used to do.

After 9/11, I think somewhere in the back of my head, I always just had this lingering curiosity of what the Middle East was like. So I went to Iran in December 2004. I wanted to look at the political opposition, the dissident groups, and the reformists. And all I had to do was get exposed to young people even a little bit in my first week there to realize that I had been trying to study the wrong opposition — that there was a much more interesting opposition in that country and all of these countries, which is that 60 percent of those in these countries who are under the age of 30 do things just like me as a young American.

ABC NEWS: What impressed you most about those young people that you ran into in Iran?

COHEN: I think what impressed me most about young people in Iran is just their resilience. No matter what's thrown at them, no matter how difficult things are, they just find a way to coexist and they find a way to be young people. The Iranian young people that I met refused to have their identities hijacked by either political entities or religious entities. I think the Iranian young people have really emerged as the de facto opposition in that country in the sense that they brought about a number of social and recreational changes by virtue of what they've been able to do by mass action in the pursuit of comfort in that country.

ABC NEWS: You say that they embrace their youth. What exactly do they do? How do they behave? What are the parallels?

COHEN: Well, there's a chapter in "Children of Jihad" called Democracy after Dark, which takes place in Iran, where I talk about how as soon as I went out with young Iranians for the first time after the sun went down. It's no different than the United States. Once the sun goes down and the parents are nowhere in sight, the girls wear very garish makeup and very fancy clothes, and the hijabs are pushed all the way back, and the kids drink, and they make alcohol in their bathtubs and in their sinks and there's rampant drug use, and the parties feel more like a fraternity party than they do a party that you'd expect in the Islamic Republic. And they do drag racing down the streets, they use Bluetooth to arrange for illicit trysts. They crumple up pieces of paper with their phone numbers on it and throw it in each other's windows, and it's really a remarkable scene. It's them expressing themselves. It's not that they're rambunctious and out of control, it's that every drop of alcohol they drink, every beat of Western music they listen to, everything they do that they're not supposed to do, whether they realize it or not, they're doing it, in part, in defiance of the regime.