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Posted on 09/29/2002 9:02:58 AM PDT by Excuse_My_Bellicosity
WASHINGTON -- For $2,000, you can risk your life in Baghdad.
Included in that price: round-trip airfare from the United States, ground transportation from Jordan to Iraq, and lodging in a $10-a-night hotel where rats gnaw on the floorboards and a cluttered basement doubles as a bomb shelter.
While the Middle East braces for war, about three dozen self-described peaceniks will rotate into Iraq on renewable 10-day visas for as long as a threat exists.
The pacifists range in age from 25 to 77. They are coming from all over the country -- from Florida to Washington, from Louisiana to Indiana -- to put themselves in harm's way if the United States attacks Iraq.
"It is important for people serious about peace to take it as seriously as the people who engage in warfare," said Claire Evans, a delegation coordinator for Christian Peacemaker Teams, one of at least two peace groups sending volunteers to Baghdad. "We should be as willing as the soldiers to risk our lives."
They hope their presence in Iraq as international witnesses to record the damage -- and possibly be counted among the injured -- will persuade military planners not to bomb civilian infrastructure, a target in the rush to disable Iraq's military during the Persian Gulf War.
So, like the storms of war, the pacifists gather. Retirees have been particularly recruited and about a dozen have agreed to go.
"It has some moral weight to have a group of people there like grandmothers and grandfathers," Evans said.
One Life to Live: The volunteers will work in Iraq with humanitarian agencies such as UNICEF and the Red Crescent Society. In the event of a U.S. bombing, they will attempt to be near likely targets such as electrical plants, roads and bridges, said Kathy Kelly, co-founder of Voices in the Wilderness, a nonprofit organization sending three peacekeeping groups to Baghdad.
Kelly, who has made 16 trips to Iraq, sounds unflinching. She is driven by the tremendous collateral damage inflicted by today's weapons. The United Nations described the damage to Iraq after the gulf war as "near-apocalyptic."
"You can't be a vegetarian only between meals," said Kelly, 49. "And you can't be a pacifist only between wars."
She has been blunt when recruiting volunteers for this trip: "We are asking people to be able to say they have had a good life and this could be their last year."
Naive Efforts? Retired U.S. Air Force Col. John A. Warden III, architect of the Desert Storm air campaign in 1991, calls the peace effort noble but extraordinarily naive.
"It represents a gross misunderstanding of modern war," he said by phone from his home in rural Alabama.
If U.S. military officials decide that demolishing Iraqi transportation, electricity and communication is the best way to limit combat casualties, pacifists are not likely to thwart that strategy.
Still, Warden sounded awed by their effort. The closest thing to it he could recall was actress and activist Jane Fonda visiting prisoner-of-war camps in Hanoi during the Vietnam War and "making common cause with North Vietnamese communists."
But like Fonda, Warden said, Kelly and her entourages are "intruding in something they don't understand."
Following the gulf war, the United States would have helped repair Iraq's damaged infrastructure if Saddam Hussein had allowed it, he said. And a dictator who hoards national funds and uses chemical weapons against his own people poses a long-term threat to the entire region.
If Saddam is removed, Warden said, the international community would rush in and help Iraq rise above its impoverished existence.
"It strikes me as pretty bizarre," Warden said, "that you would have Americans going to protect one of the evilest guys in the world from getting his just desserts."
Pacifist Tom Nagy, a professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., does not doubt Saddam's menace. He is not choosing sides. He only wants to staunch the suffering of innocent Iraqis who were caught in Desert Storm's crossfire, he said.
More than 14 million Iraqis endured inadequate and polluted water supplies after the gulf war, the United Nations reported. Children, especially infants and toddlers, were highly susceptible to dehydration, cholera and diarrhea. The New England Journal of Medicine calculated that tens of thousands died from waterborne illnesses and malnutrition in the months after the war.
Breaking the Law: Nagy, 58, a Quaker-turned-Buddhist and father of one, leaves for Baghdad on Sept. 27. His usual lighthearted manner is brooding today, and he acknowledges he is afraid. He is preparing his will and has bought emergency medical evacuation insurance that could help expedite his rescue from Iraq.
A sympathetic psychiatrist has prescribed a mild tranquilizer.
"I'm not a brave guy," Nagy said.
He will be traveling with Seattle's Bert Sacks, 60, a retired civil engineer who is ferrying medicine for diarrhea and dysentery to Baghdad despite being fined $10,000 by the U.S. government for defying U.N. sanctions in 1997.
Sacks has refused to pay the fine. He could face up to 12 years in prison and penalties of up to $1 million for continuing to violate sanctions.
"Yes, I have concerns about increased penalties for again bringing medicines to Iraq," Sacks said. "And yes, I again plan to bring medicines to Iraq."
Bill Quigley, an attorney from New Orleans, also plans to break the law. On Sept. 18, the day before he left with a Voices in the Wilderness group on his first trip to Iraq, Quigley, 53, was searching for luggage large enough to cart 100 pounds of donated medicines.
He was motivated by a man he represented in court, a 65-year-old Franciscan priest from Cedar Lake, Ind., who was sentenced in July to 6 months in prison for trespassing during a peace protest at Fort Benning, Ga.
During his trial, the Rev. Jerry Zawada told Quigley, "If I'm convicted, I want to go immediately to jail so I can maybe be out in time to go to Iraq" before the United States attacks.
Quigley is scared of flying. He has never traveled farther than London and he knows his first visit to Iraq could land him in jail. These are the least of his worries.
"All of my family and friends and students are scared to death," he said. "Half are afraid of what the people in Iraq are going to do. The other half are afraid of what the United States [military] is going to do."
After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, Americans and other foreigners in Iraq and Kuwait were held hostage by Saddam and used as shields against an attack threatened by U.S.-led allied forces. Under international pressure, Saddam freed the civilians one month before the gulf war.
This time, the human shields are volunteers who know the dangers that lie ahead. Primary among the threats is the possibility of an Iraqi coup that might be hostile toward foreign pacifists in Iraq with Saddam's official blessing.
"This might not make us the most popular people during a coup," said Kelly. "This (trip) has so many uncertainties."
Yet young and old alike, they are compelled to go. Margaret Gish, 60, a retired farmer from Athens, Ohio. Marian Solomon, 72, a retired nurse from Ames, Iowa. Leah Wells, 26, a teacher from Santa Barbara, Calif. Joseph Heckel, 77, a retired Presbyterian clergyman from Pittsburgh. Bill Rose, 69, a retired postal worker from Tampa, Fla.
"The only thing that stands in the way of evil prevailing are good-hearted people that refuse to remain quiet and indifferent," said Rose, a father of two.
He leaves for Baghdad Oct. 23.
"I am a Christian," he said. "I am a Quaker. I have had a good life."
Hitting the nail on the head...
Well, I don't see why they need a round trip ticket... Bombs Away!! (cackle)
Two reasonable alternatives from these actions:
(a) Tell him all charges will be dropped if he carries an additional suitcase for us and attends a 'Saddam appreciation rally' or two while there. Or,
(b) Meet him at the airport when he returns, if he survives, and lock him away for the rest of his life. [After confiscating everything he owned to cover the millions in fines he 'could' face.]
Maybe a third alternative, but I doubt that a GPS beacon would fit where I'd like to have him wearing it.
I hope they pitch a tent near a SAM site.
Pretty close, except that these are ordinary people, not a publicity-seeking actress like Jane. I was around then, I remember.. the "Hollywood Left" was just coming back out of the closet after the McCarthy purges, and it was all the radical chic to be opposed to the war... I always viewed Hanoi Jane's trip to Hanoi as a cheap publicity stunt by a B-movie actress trying to be seen as "hipper than thou" amongst the liberals.
She was saved from treason charges mostly because she was Henry Fonda's daughter. But this is different I think... These "peaceniks" are leftovers from that era, for sure, and they are still deluded by the ideas of their youth. But they AREN'T Henry Fonda's daughter. And this ain't the '60s.
Volunteering to take part in the enemy's war effort by becoming voluntary "Human Shields" could be easily interpreted as providing aid and comfort to the enemy, even though this bunch would probably view treason charges as a badge of honor. It's almost as if they want to be seen as martyrs for the cause of "peace". Boy, now wouldn't that make them stand out from the crowd... if you get my drift.
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