Posted on 08/11/2003 9:53:21 AM PDT by kattracks
On May 22, 2003, the United Nations (U.N.) lifted the sanctions regime it had imposed on Iraq twelve years earlier. The end of the economic embargo invites a review of the "peace" activism that was aimed at bringing down the Iraq sanctions while Saddam Hussein ruled. Anti-sanctions groups sought to relieve the suffering of the Iraqi people. In fact, they became—whether wittingly or unwittingly—mouthpieces for Saddam in the United States. I should know: I have the dubious distinction of having been one of them.
My own interest in Iraq goes back to Desert Storm, when as a nineteen-year-old Army reservist fresh out of a semi-rural high school, I was very nearly deployed to Saudi Arabia as a medic. This aroused my curiosity about Iraq. After I did some work in several homeless shelters run by Catholic Worker activists, I gravitated toward their allied movement against sanctions. For three years I was dedicated to the anti-sanctions cause. I traveled to Iraq in 1998 in order to see sanctions firsthand, and upon my return to the United States, I made two national speaking tours on the college activist circuit, in 1998 and 1999. (At the time, I was completing my undergraduate degree in Middle East studies at Western Washington University.)
I intended to use the knowledge I acquired in my academic work to aid my "real" job as an anti-sanctions activist. But I got derailed when I realized that in order to return to Iraq with the group I represented—the Chicago-based "Voices in the Wilderness"—I and other group members could not speak publicly about issues that would embarrass the Iraqi regime. These included its horrendous human rights record, its involvement with weapons of mass destruction, and the dictatorial nature of the regime. We were allowed to speak only of one thing: the deprivations suffered by ordinary Iraqis under the sanctions regime.
This one-dimensional depiction of life in Saddam's Iraq was pure Baath propaganda, and I (as well as other group members) knew it. As I came to see this as a complicity and collaboration with one of the most abusive dictatorships in the world, I tried to get the rest of my group to acknowledge that our close relationship with the regime damaged our credibility. I failed to persuade them, so I quit. Unfortunately, it seems that my former colleagues have regarded this decision as a kind of political "defection," and it has cost me several friendships, which were apparently contingent on my continued willingness to toe the (Baathist) line.
Since then, I have returned to university with the objective of becoming a professional historian of Baathist Iraq. I am no longer a political activist, and it will likely be some time before I assume that role again, if I ever do. In this article, I wish to look back at this rather peculiar aspect of the American peace movement and offer an honest and firsthand account of how it worked from the inside.
The Pedigree
My group, Voices in the Wilderness (henceforth, Voices), was founded in 1996. Its name is an allusion to the biblical prophet Isaiah, who cried out for justice in a wilderness of injustice (Isaiah, 40:3). The name clearly embodied the group's view of Iraqi sanctions: they were acts of injustice perpetrated by the United States government upon the people of Iraq. Someone had to cry out for justice—understood to be the unconditional lifting of sanctions—and Voices members saw themselves as modern-day Isaiahs, calling America to its conscience.
Voices preached by its actions—more particularly, by conducting regular trips to Iraq to deliver medical and other supplies, all in violation of the U.N. sanctions regime as well as several U.S. laws and presidential executive orders. The quantity of aid we brought to Iraq was always a paltry, symbolic amount, but the real emphasis of Voices was to have group members "witness" the detrimental effects of sanctions for themselves, by visiting Iraqi hospitals, schools, and other areas—always in the presence of official "minders" of the Iraqi regime. These orchestrated trips provided the grist for group members, who returned home to educate their communities on the horrors of the U.S.-imposed sanctions. In my case, the propaganda fed to me in Iraq by regime spokespersons was my primary source of information on sanctions, which I then imparted to audiences all across the United States. The same was true of my colleagues.
The story of Voices is one of a simplistic utopian vision of peace being applied to an intractable humanitarian and political catastrophe. This may be a trait that cuts across the entire peace movement, but Voices had its own unique characteristics, which reflected its distinct pedigree within the larger peace movement. Voices was formed from the remnants of what has been dubbed the "Catholic Ultra-resistance,"[1]—those Catholic radicals centered on the Catholic Worker movement and the personalities of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and, especially, the radical priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan. Almost without exception, the founding members of Voices were drawn from the Catholic Worker movement, which has always seen U.S. government's foreign—as well as many domestic—policies as violent, and therefore, morally unacceptable.
The Catholic Worker movement developed a doctrine of nonviolent resistance, and its actions drew national attention during the Vietnam war. The Berrigan brothers became famous by stretching the meaning of nonviolence in their antiwar actions. In 1968, they "nonviolently" entered a draft board office in Catonsville, Maryland, and used homemade napalm to burn the files of recent inductees mobilized for the Vietnam war. This action was seen as a way to end (or at least retard) the war-making process; because it was against the war, it was seen as inherently nonviolent. The Berrigans performed this and other acts that extended Gandhi's definitions of nonviolence on the basis of their own belief that Catholic ethics summoned them to perform radical actions for peace.
Such provocative actions were, for the Berrigans, not just protests against the war but also dramatic prayers for peace. This peculiar combination of high drama and liturgy manifested itself again in the Plowshares movement, beginning in 1980. The Berrigan brothers, as well as Catholic (and non-Catholic) radicals, would sneak onto military bases housing the U.S. nuclear arsenal and bang away on missile casings until they were arrested by military police. By such acts, they were symbolically "beating swords into plowshares." This movement is still active, and its members frequently end up in federal prison for performing such acts of "nonviolence."
Voices belonged very much to this tradition with its emphasis on symbolic acts. The group's trips to Iraq with symbolic amounts of medical aid were to Voices what the burning of draft files was to the Berrigans and what the beating of nuclear weapons into "plowshares" is to the Plowshares movement. In fact, many individual Plowshares veterans supported Voices and occasionally joined it. Daniel Berrigan himself gave Voices a ringing endorsement:
An embargo has advantages over armed conflict; no Americans need die, no international furor over smart bombs incinerating people in shelters. It's simple and cheap, the noose tightens, and children and the aged and sick die in great numbers. This must be countered. "Voices in the Wilderness" is doing just that—cutting the noose.[2]
All of these interrelated social movements are characterized by "dramaturgy"—the combination of drama and liturgy, with ostensible prayers for peace and dramatic protest action in the face of significant jail terms. For some of these activists, dramaturgical protest has become nearly synonymous with other (traditional) Catholic sacraments, as exemplified by the title of Jesuit priest John Dear's popular volume, The Sacrament of Civil Disobedience.[3]
The Voices' specific dramaturgical protest involved travels to Iraq in direct violation of a U.S. government travel ban. The point of the ban was to prevent Americans from aiding the Iraqi economy, on the theory that the regime, once weakened, would either comply with U.N. disarmament requirements, or perhaps fall altogether. Voices always highlighted the fact that it was breaking the law. The penalties for Voices' Iraq delegations could have reached twelve years in federal prison and $1.25 million in fines and fees. Voices tempted the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to levy these penalties against them every time its members went to Iraq, perhaps hoping for the maximum penalties in order to bring the maximum amount of publicity to its cause.
(Excerpt) Read more at meforum.org ...
There's no way the others in the group couldn't have come to the same conclusions that the auhor did, having the same information, which glaringly points out that this group has an agenda, other than "relief" for the Iraqi people.
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