"I will not war against women and children. I have ordered my air force to restrict itself to attacks on military objectives.” For weeks now, the atmosphere in Washington has been heavy with such promises of humility and restraint. That particular promise happened to be made by Adolf Hitler, on the occasion of his declaration of war against Poland in September 1939, but it serves to illustrate the universal desire of statesmen to make their most monstrous missions seem like acts of mercy."
--Andrew Kopkind.

It is neither the best of times nor the worst of times in Baghdad. Abi Nuwa's street, which runs parallel to the Tigris River through Baghdad, remains as busy as ever, packed with dilapidated cars careening down the street in a kind of leisurely recklessness that would make Beijing drivers proud. Skinny eight year old boys still hustle tourists (yes, there are still tourists coming to Baghdad) with the promise of beautiful shoe shines and sad stories about a strange fever that only goes away with money or chocolates. Poverty still looms in every house without food or a working toilet. Saddam Central Hospital still doesn't have aspirin and none of the city power plants are fully operational. The first gulf war and the UN sanctions have crippled Baghdad into this state: a new war threatens to bomb the city into a nonexistent one. But these matters seem minor on a radiant and breezy day like today. There are foreigners to hustle, tea to drink, and dominos to play on the banks of the Tigris. Cities that have gone through the trauma of war either collapse under the weight of their own misery or survive by cobbling together a makeshift life using the rubble from their past. Baghdad chooses to survive.

At a modest hotel near the center of the city called the Al-Fanar, the thirty members of the Iraq peace team are cobbling together the ultimate survival plan for Baghdad and the whole of Iraq: a plan for peace. It is a Sisyphean task. There is not much room to work and likely not much time. The US military buildup in the Middle East increases with each passing day. And it is clear that there is absolutely nothing the Iraqi government can do or say or declare that will change Washington’s mind. How do you stop a future so hell bent on coming?

The Iraq Peace Team is a project of Voices in the Wilderness, a campaign to end the sanctions imposed on Iraq after the first Gulf War. Since 1996, Kathy Kelly, co-coordinator of Voices, has led nearly fifty delegations into Iraq, bringing with her politicians, writers, activists, medicines, books, and toys to the Iraqi people, trying to alleviate in some small way the burden of the sanctions and to campaign for its termination. For Kelly, the sanctions act like a second war against Iraq, but this time waged directly against the Iraqi people. The sanctions ban all imports into the country except for medicines and supplies for what is called “essential” civilian needs. Essential is the key term here. Is clean water essential? Apparently not, since components to rebuild the water treatment plants in Baghdad did not get clearance. What about electricity? Not essential either. Iraqi officials recently purchased a six million dollar power plant from a British company, only to have it sit in Baghdad because the installation manual, computer software, and technical advisors were all denied permission to enter Iraq. The sanctions were supposed to disable the military regime by denying them the ability to rebuild. But what they have actually done is to deny the Iraqi people the right to be civilians. The sanctions have transformed Baghdad into the world's largest military prison. And the prisoners are slowly dying.

It is the impending third war against Iraq that brings Kelly back to Baghdad. This is her seventeenth trip to this city of five million people. In many of the neighborhoods she works in they affectionately call her Ms. Kathy. She can quote Albert Camus effortlessly and has long gray hair and a slight overbite that makes her smile ever effective at easing nervous Iraqi officials who watch over the peace team, or nervous team members who are, well, just plain nervous about the possibility of war. This is a very useful skill, since the fluid circumstances and the tension that comes from working in a possible war zone demand a mode of mediation that is direct but non-confrontational. This style is also reflected in the goal of the team: be a source of news and inspiration for the anti-war movement outside Iraq by connecting with the Iraqi people and publicizing the suffering the sanctions have created and the chaos a new war will bring to this devastated country. The Iraqi government doesn't help. Although they have given the blessing of the Iraq peace team to be in Baghdad, there are restrictions about what the team can do in terms of political actions or media events. The US government doesn't help either. They have fined Voices in the Wilderness over $163,000 and have threatened members with twelve years of prison and fines of up to one million dollars for bringing toys and medicines into the country.

This hasn't deterred the twenty nine people from around the world to join Kelly in Baghdad. There is John, a lively seventy eight year old World War II veteran and former television producer from New Mexico. John plays both the sage and the fool in the group. At a recent visit to the University of Baghdad, he was the main attraction on the campus square, yelling "I love you" in Arabic to a cheering crowd of students. Bitta is a twenty two year old Iranian activist. She can be radiant in front of news cameras and this is undoubtedly why she is one of the spokespeople for the peace team. There is Peggy, the organic farmer from Ohio, and Tom, the flamboyant deacon and organizer for the Catholic workers movement in New York. There is Theresa, the school teacher from Illinois, who had problems bringing her guitar into Iraq until she played a song for the Iraqi border guards. There is George, the storyteller from Massachusetts, and Micah, the former copy editor from Nepal. They are activists and nurses and artists and lawyers. They come from England, Canada, Ireland, and the United States.

They don't have the answer for how the war can be stopped. But it is clear that thirty people in Baghdad cannot do it alone. It will take a kind of mass mobilization within the next few weeks, from every part of the globe, to create a critical mass big enough to generate the gravity that can shift the debate from when to why. It will take a scale of organizing not seen since the height of the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations. But that took at least four years and thousands of dead American soldiers. This war will have a shorter shelf life. And the ingredients for this war will be primarily technological and non-human. One does not mourn the loss of a laser-guided missile. So are the deaths of Iraqi civilians and the extermination of a whole society enough to stop a war waged in the name of freedom and motivated by profit?

The hope is it will be. It is harder to kill indiscriminately when a name is attached to a body. The closer the image of the other is to ourselves, the less likely we are to abstract them into oblivion or indifference. There is the usual grunt work of press releases, phone calls, and demonstrations to work on. But the main task of the peace team is simply to meet people. The extended family of the peace team number in the hundreds. They range from Amal, a painter and mother of seven who lives in the oldest house in Baghdad, to Dr. Saad Al Hassani, the graceful drama professor at the University of Baghdad who asked team members to smuggle in books by Samuel Beckett for his students (the sanctions will not allow books since it is not considered an essential civilian need and weighs over eleven ounces). This informal network of Iraqis, together with the peace team, become a small political ecosystem that sustains the work through mutual support and exchange. Peace team members like George bring chemotherapy drugs, which is virtually non-existent in Baghdad, to an Iraqi friend who has breast cancer. She in turn introduces him to family and friends who are more than willing to befriend an American who does not want to bomb them. George introduces his new friends to the peace team. And the word spreads, to neighborhoods, restaurants, schools, and mosques.

This kind of political work is at once intimate and painful because the connections one makes are intense and in the flesh. After a visit to an Iraqi family's home, which usually lasts four to five hours, with the obligatory meal made from the food rations given out by the government and several rounds of sweet tea, they no longer look like the wretched of the earth. They are the eleven year old twins, He'be and Du'a, who loves Jackie Chan (Baghdad television broadcasts a movie every night at 11:30PM). And Shouruk, the twenty two year old student who believes sadness is the primary value in music, and thinks Celine Dion is the pinnacle of this value. This is as grassroots as political work gets, which is to say it is slow and the results are hard to quantify. Does it serve peace to know that Sundus, who is thirty three years old and has sparkling azure eyes, suffers from bouts of influenza that cripples her? Yes, if it means the team can get her medicine that will make her healthy again so she can rejoin the constellation of people working in Baghdad with the team. Yes, people can be saved. But peoples cannot. The peace team can only provide the prototype, not the product, of peacemaking. For that it will take movements and actions as well as coalitions and consensus from the outside.

Tonight, a wedding party arrived at the Al-Fanar Hotel. Most of the members of the peace team had just returned from a press conference that was staged at a defunct power plant twenty minutes from the center of Baghdad. The goal was to highlight the need to lift the sanctions so the plant can become operational again. There were speeches and the requisite candle-light vigil. A group calling themselves the Japan-Iraq Friendship Committee arrived to lend their solidarity. It was a good event but the timing was bad. Earlier in the day, Colin Powell had delivered his message to the UN security council. The official US position is the position everyone had expected after Iraq delivered the 12,000 page report detailing their weapons production: they are lying. So tonight, at the same time as the power plant action, all the press in Baghdad converged on the ministry of information to hear the Iraqi rebuttal from General Amer al-Saadi, a former scientist and head weapons advisor for the Iraqi government.

Peace team members were being briefed about the Iraqi response in the lobby of the hotel when the music began. Everyone streams out of the hotel to see the ruckus. A cavalcade of thirty or so had set up an impromptu dance party outside the Al-Fanar. The bride and the groom, who were from Basra, a city in southern Iraq, stand on one side, stiff but smiling. Their family twists and turns in front of the newlyweds, accompanied by a three man band playing a kind of music that sounds vaguely like marching songs. All of a sudden, someone grabs me and I find myself in the middle of the dancing. I wasn't the only one. Sheila, a thirty year old activist and part of the Catholic Worker movement joins the fray with the insistence of three girls. There were others from the team who joined the party but I couldn't keep count. Men were spraying a white foamy substance into the air and the women were recruiting the elders to shake it. In the midst of the chaos and the reverie no one seemed to mind that on another plane of existence men are planning the city's destruction. No matter. This is what Baghdad is like. People were laughing and dancing and not yet done.