Submitted by the author.

“Eez beautiful, my city, Baghdad!” Thirteen year old shoe-shine boy Ahmed throws his arms into the air, his face beaming to the morning sun across the Tigris. “Eez beautiful city, no, Baghdad?”

I can’t tell him, once surely, a beautiful, even a magnificent city, unimaginably beautiful: broad boulevards and splendid mosques of gleaming tiles, glowing domes, lovely private homes and public buildings, parks and monuments depicting tales from the Thousand and One Nights. But now the park bordering the river across the street from our modest hotel is derelict. Its open air fish restaurants seem rich and gaudy lit up at night with neon. In the light of day they are revealed bleak and forlorn.

Ahmed has a spot on the sidewalk in front of our modest hotel for his shoe-shine box. He is proud of his city. “Ad ogni ucello il suo nido e bello,” I remember the Italian proverb, “To every bird its own nest is beautiful.” Ahmed belongs here and his city belongs to him. He is in a state of denial. Everyone here has to be. We are under unspeakable threat. No one could function here constantly aware of the overwhelming destructive power of American technological warfare gathering to strike. Bomb shelters offer slight comfort after two U.S. shells pierced through five layers of reinforced concrete at the Al-Amariyah shelter in 1991, killing hundreds, wiping out entire families. Shadows of victims are still imprinted on floors and walls.

Rubble in the streets, broken pavements, hollowed bombed out buildings, piles of bricks from demolished buildings everywhere; buildings destroyed by the force of concussion still stand empty shells alongside working buildings. All this the result of five weeks of around-the-clock U.S. bombing in 1991 and the embargo, “sanctions” ever since. Men in military uniform carry automatic rifles on every street, boys many of them. There is no soft-core pornography on billboards luring customers to buy tooth-paste and automobiles. Beggars press upon me, women hold malnourished children for display, little girls follow doggedly pleading; old women and men sit on the sidewalk with paper cup in hand. But there is no evidence of homelessness. People apparently still take care of their own.

Portraits of “The Great Leader” are everywhere, Saddam carrying a sword, Saddam brandishing a rifle, Saddam sitting serenely in a chair looking very Western in tie and tailored suit, or praying or wearing a kaffiyah around his head. “The great leader,” duce, fuehrer. Saddam Hussein is one of many ruthless dictators around the world, some of them are our best “friends,” as he was not so long ago when the U.S. supplied his military.

Few women are on the streets, and most of them are accompanied by a man. Very few are veiled, fewer in the all enshrouding burqa, but almost all women wear a scarf. Most men on the street wear Western dress, a few wear caftans, most have a kaffiyah on their heads, some flowing, some twisted as a turban. Men wink at young boys in the street and they smile, as Americans did when I was a boy. But that was
many years ago. You can’t do that in the home of the free and the brave now, not any more.

The atmosphere on the street is brisk. Men respect each other but there is a no-nonsense feel to the place. And a sense of God. The Call to Prayer sounds from the minarets five times a day. Sometimes you can hear competing chants from mosques not far from each other, echoing. Few seem to notice, no one stops to pray, or so it seems. They bustle on, but many with prayer beads in hand recite the names of Allah. It is a kind of consolation to me that when I ask about the teachings of the Koran, most people seem to know as little about their religion as fellow Christians in the West do about ours. Nevertheless, there is an awareness of the saturating presence of The Other here, far more than in Times Square.

As night falls three pre-teenage boys sift through a mound of garbage for lettuce leaves, stuffing them into their mouths. I thrust a few dinar notes into the hand of the nearest and rush away in shame.

Households have been given five months' food rations in order to get supplies out of the main storage sites in the event of bombardment. The Iraqi food distribution program, according to Denis Halliday, Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations and UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq (1997-98) who resigned in protest, is efficient, involving 49,000 food distribution agents with strict accountability. Iraqis are also stock-piling water.

Under the UN Oil-for-Food Program only about half the oil revenues can be used for buying food and other necessities for the population of the center and south of the country; the rest being used for compensation to Kuwait, food for the Iraqi Kurds in the north, and the costs of the UNMOVIC weapons inspections. According to UNICEF, twenty-five percent of Iraqi babies are born weighing less than five pounds, a key indicator of famine. One million children under five suffer acute or chronic malnutrition.

Father Michael Baxter, C.S.C., of the theology faculty at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, the new national secretary of the revived Catholic Peace Fellowship, and I, the old national secretary, are here to visit people, especially in the religious communities, especially fellow Christians to bring the message home that Iraqis are people, that many of them, over a million Iraqi Christians in the same Mystical Body of Christ pray just as we do, and for the same things.

Fr. Baxter has taken a shine to little Hassan, Ahmed’s eight year old apprentice shoe-shine boy. They play soccer in the afternoon with a group in the park. Ahmed spots me for an easy touch. I don’t mind. After we get to know each other I ask him what he earns and he tells me. He is making three dollars a day. But he wears just
the same thin turtle-neck pullover every day and a light-weight golf jacket. He coughs in the morning cold. At three dollars a day and a six day work week, the boy is taking home more than a college professor, but he certainly isn’t spending it on himself . He’s
giving it to his family, the major breadwinner. I have been there myself. So I put him on account, a retainer, as it were, and have my shoes shined three times a day. It’s been decades since I had my shoes shined in New York.

Hassan is small for his age and grimy and out much too late at night. His father is an “Ali Baba,” a thief, the taxi man tells us, currently in jail, and his mother in the underground economy, so Hassan is neglected. But he is spunky and maybe something of an an actor. He can call up the tears at will as he puts fingers to mouth to
mimic eating. “Monney pleeze, monney,” he pleads, trotting along beside his target.
He’s so funny I peel off a couple of 250 dinar notes, two bits, twenty-five cents. He smiles as I teach him how to accept folded bills surreptitiously, palm to palm in a
handshake, as they do at the fancy restaurants in the States when you tip the maitre d’ for a good table. I’ve never done it myself but I know how. Later I come upon Hassan in the dark, crying, and there is no audience. He is hungry and cold and alone.

“Don’t eat the fish! I got so sick I lost more weight than ever in my life and my tongue turned black,” Dee Ann tells me. She and her husband, a physician, are
making a second tour. Eating fish taken from a river that swallows 40,000 tons of raw sewage a day might compromise one’s health. That’s one reason why so many people have died, half a million children under the age of five since the 1991 bombings of the water treatment plants. It’s a form of biological warfare, and it is also a means of mass destruction.

Voices in the Wilderness got us entry visas into the country. It is illegal for us to be here without specific U.S. State Department authorization, at the risk of a one million dollar fine and up to twelve years imprisonment. No one has yet been
prosecuted. Voices has sent over sixty delegations to Iraq since 1996, breaking economic sanctions through incurring travel related expenses and by transferring medical supplies. In November, 2002, the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) imposed penalties on Voices and selected individuals, a total of $50,000 in fines.

Entry visas are processed at the Jordanian border. Our passports are not stamped, the visas (renewal stamps are required every week or ten days) are on
separate pieces of paper. We will answer questions on re-entry into the U.S. fully and truthfully and leave it up to the feds what to do about it. We are carrying over thirty thousand dollars in antibiotics to give to St. Raphael Hospital in Baghdad. It’s a work of mercy. So be it.

Christian Peacemaking Teams, mostly Mennonites and Brethren have for many years done excellent accompanying work in Palestine, and now Iraq. Our whole group numbers nearly thirty, shifting frequently, delegations and individuals coming and going. Coordinating such a group is extraordinarily difficult. The Iraqi Foreign Ministry assigns an officer to clear our plans beforehand with his superiors and then arrange to have “minders”accompany us wherever we go. The minders tell us what we may and may not do, where not to take photos, for instance, or to aim field glasses.
They accompany us to museums, concerts and private homes and on trips to other cities. The most freedom we have is in religious houses. Our Foreign Ministry man is as cooperative as he can be and seems genuinely concerned for our safety. He is
shaken by the death of George Weber, a 73 year old Canadian CPT veteran of several campaigns in Hebron. George died in an automobile accident on the road back from Basrah in the south. The government man allows us more lee-way. The Voices volunteers and the CPT people are doing a hard job with skill, patience, good humor

and prudence. Kathy Kelly is the central organizer, and Gabe Huck, once of Liturgy Training Publications in Chicago, an old friend from the Viet Nam days, works full-time in the Chicago office. It is a delight to see him again and his wife Theresa Kubasak here in Baghdad.

Cathy Breen of the New York Catholic Worker has here for three months. She intends to stay as long as the authorities renew her visa, come what may. What a joy to see her, an effective ambassador of goodwill! In a matter of fact way, we discuss in a meeting the possibilities of being taken hostage, of what to do with our mortal remains if it comes to that. “My mother and father want to know it’s really me,” Cathy says. “Just have someone identify the body and dispose of it as you will.”

Voices and CPT people are in three hotels, two around the corner from each other. Cathy is only about six blocks away. She and Cliff Kindy of CPT have become invaluable detail people. They even have kitchen privileges at their hotel. We have to be very careful how we present ourselves, and Cathy and Cliff know just how to
do it. Iraqis are sensitive to breaches in good manners and the media will twist and misrepresent our message without conscience, so everyone has to be on guard. It’s also necessary to anticipate what might compromise an on-going presence in an authoritarian state under siege.

There is a huge electrical generator in a cage on the sidewalk in front of our hotel, and huge plastic containers of gasoline to fuel it in case of a power
failure. The hotel manager assures us that his staff will take care of us in case there is an attack and we can’t get out. They too are stocking up on bottled water. “My dear Mister Thomas, how are you this morning?” the manager greets me, upturned moustache and British accent making him like seem like a character actor in an old movie.

This is certainly a male society and almost all the men smoke almost everywhere and they drive like maniacs. So does the young nun who drives me home from a visit to her school and church. I was impressed to see thirty-five or so young women in the Catholic church venerating the relics of Saint Therese which are here on loan only for a day. There were prayers and hymns and a student rose to the ambo to deliver a meditation. The girls filed out. Then another group, the same routine, then another. About three hundred and fifty young women in all!

Cathy Breen introduces us to her new friend, a neighbor, Adma. She paints Iraqi scenes on paper, cloth and canvass and sells her work to supplement her husband’s income as a religious teacher in a mosque. She is hospitable, offers small
glasses of sweet tea and freely speaks of her faith and customs with sensitivity and
respect for ours. Later she, her gorgeous little daughter and two smaller boys
accompany us to a power plant outside the city for a candle-light demonstration to
highlight the vulnerability of the infrastructure and the devastating effects on the
civilian population of its destruction. Nine year old Abeer’s beauty is unforgettable, blue eyes set in perfect features, fair complection and flowing, gleaming black hair. What is more precious? I think of my blond granddaughter Rachel and staunch the tears. We demonstrate on New Year’s Day also at the UN headquarters. The inspectors wave at us as they drive out in their white vans.

It is the people we came to see, especially the Christian communities. There are at least one million Christians in Iraq. The largest communities are Orthodox, then come Catholic, both Latin and Chaldean rites. The Chaldeans use Aramaic, the language of the Holy Family. There are Armenian Orthodox and Catholic and Assyrians and Nestorians and... it’s bewildering. One seminary in Baghdad serves students from all the communities, with 47 faculty and over 263 students, some in training as catechists and DREs, a few for the priesthood. Bishop Jacques Isaac, a Chaldean Catholic, is rector. He takes most of a day to pick us up, drive us to his school, walk us through and introduce us, then take us to a neighborhood called “The Little Vatican” where many Christian communions live side by side with Muslims as well, and to houses of religious women.

If an Orthodox priest has to leave town unexpectedly, he is likely to call upon the Catholic pastor down the street to cover his Masses for him, so the bishop tells me. They don’t ask their bishops’ conferences if it’s all right because the Orthodox bishops refuse intercommunion except in cases of dire necessity, in extremis. It’s an on-the-ground ecumenism that Bishop Isaac thinks is a blueprint for the future.

He also claims that the tenacity of the Chaldean church during the time of the Islamic and Arab conquest was due to their liturgy. It was and is an organic expression of their own culture, whereas in North Africa, Christians were eased away from their Christian religion into Islam because their liturgy was in Latin and followed forms that grew out of an alien, European culture.

An Armenian Orthodox priest invites us to his home after Mass. He had been a soldier in the army before seminary, he tells us, and his language resonates the barracks more than the sacristy. “If you send ground forces,” he says, “we’ll beat the shit out of you. We’re not afraid to die. You are. We will take tens, hundreds of thousands of losses. You will not!” He is not pacific. “Our leader will protect us.”

Over and over we heard that Christians are respected in Iraq, that they have been there six and seven centuries before the Muslims, except for the Armenians who came only a hundred years ago from Turkey to escape persecution, that they are
deeply embedded in the society. On top of that, the current government is swift to squelch any manifestation of religious extremism. All Christians we spoke to, in all the
churches, said the same thing. This government protects us. We fear chaos more than
anything because it will make us vulnerable to extremist elements. People do not speak
of political alternatives. They dare not. The first item on the agenda has to be faithfulness, simply to keep the faith, then survival.

Fr. Baxter went to Basrah for Christmas. He concelebrated Christmas Mass in the Chaldean rite with Archbishop Kassab. I had a bug and stayed low in Baghdad. But Kathy Kelly, the leader of Voices in the Wilderness, saw me straying past the desk at our hotel and nabbed me. “Are you well enough to visit the papal nuncio?” she asked. “He’s on the telephone. You can go over with Cliff and Cathy. He probably won’t give you an interview today but you can set something up for the CPT and for yourself later.” We took a cab.

Archbishop Francesco Filoni, the Pope’s ambassador to Iraq, was expansive, very hospitable, from Southern Italy! He spoke from a broad vision of the need to develop cultures of peace, how impossible that is in a matrix of materialism. He spoke of his recent predecessor, Bishop Maroon Oles, who had been here during the 1991 bombing. Oles, a Pole, refused to leave his home for safe ground and stayed alone in the house. A building nearby was leveled. So Bishop Oles was revered by all for his courage. Filoni will stay also. I spoke of the duty to disobey, of conscientious objection. He listened carefully and agreed that citizens have the duty of conscience. He had no sympathy for President Bush’s intentions toward Iraq and made it clear that he stands with the Pope and the bishops around the world who have questioned the morality or even stated clearly the immorality of preemptive war. He reminded us that every social, economic, political or military policy has to be looked at under the question, “What does it do to the most vulnerable?” He thanked us for our work and he blessed us individually laying his hands upon our heads.

The happiest people we met were religious women, the Little Sisters of Jesus, the Chaldean Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, Mother Teresa’s
Missionary Sisters of Charity, the Dominican Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary who run St. Raphael’s Hospital. Sister Mary Anne Pierre is a classic type, large and jolly and gently forceful. When she calls a man down off a scaffold he comes down, fast! Her sisters love her as a mother, and their home, as the other women’s homes, is a refuge of peace because their lives are entirely given over to God whose will is their pleasure. Vowed life may not be “better,” but it seems happier. Baxter delivers the antibiotics to Sister Mary Anne and takes blueprints of the addition the sisters hope
to be able to build onto their hospital. She insists that Fr. Baxter take a rug as a gift, a wall hanging representing The Last Supper.

In an archway in the ancient wall of Nineveh, Fr. Baxter reads aloud the whole of the Book of Jonah. It is short enough. I heard it as for the first time and very gratefully. Baghdad is more than a castor oil plant.

In Babylon we walked through the remnants and reconstruction of the palace of Nebuchadnezzar next to the river where the Psalmist hung his harp upon a willow: “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” Our guide tells us
Alexander the Great died in this room, right here. Alexander, great but vile, the one who established the “oecumene,” the ordered house that became the great empire under Rome. How twisted is human history, how ambiguous, mysterious the interplay of good and evil, how real Original Sin!

On to Mozul in the north. It is a rainy day and we don’t have much time,
Just enough to walk the market place and notice the hostility of the stares directed our way, to eat at a popular local restaurant and to visit the Dominican Fathers. Why the hostile stares, so unlike Baghdad where I felt safe anywhere walking alone, looking like a well-dressed American? This is Kurdish country. Is it because the U.S. promised to come to their aid if the Kurds rose up and then left them stranded? Who knows?

The Jesuits are gone from Mozul, the New England Jesuits who educated me at Fairfield. I can not find parishioners of my late classmate and friend, Father Walter Young, who served here for more than twenty years. I preached for him at the
prison for young adult men in Cheshire, Connecticut, after he returned from Iraq the victim of a stroke, just after Gulf War I, in 1991, when Baxter and I returned from
counseling American military personnel in Germany who refused deployment to the

Gulf. Nothing I could say against Gulf War I was strong enough for him then. His men,
the Iraqi Christians, were the cannon-fodder of that war, on the front-lines, shot in the
back from U.S. helicopters as they fled and buried alive or dead in the sand by U.S. tanks and bulldozers. But the Dominicans are here. Prior Nageeb Mekhail led us through the splendid complex of his church and told us the same story we heard over and over again. How can the U.S. not understand the folly of its present course?

Fr. Baxter has brought along three books which I poured through as he read War and Peace. I have bought them to continue studying and I recommend them to you. One is Iraq, the Bradt Travel Guide, by Karen Dabrowski, Globe Pequot Press, 2002, Guilford, Conn., available at most book stores with a travel section. The next is
A Peace to End All Peace, by David Fromkin, from Holt, and The Vision of Islam, by Marata and Chittick, from Paragon House in St. Paul, Minn., which goes into greater depth than Karen Armstrong’s excellent Islam: a Short History, from Modern Library Chronicles. Fromkin details the lunacy of British and French imperialist policy propelling the disastrous division of the fallen Ottoman Empire after World War I. Armstrong, Marata and Chittick make available an appreciation of the beauty, the authenticity, the strength and vitality of the Muslim way to holiness, something that few Westerners seem even to want to understand. But if it in fact comes down to a clash of civilizations, don’t count on technology to win over spirit!

“Will you come back to Baghdad?” Ahmed asks me. He knows that Mike and I are preparing to leave. “No, probably not. But I won’t forget you,” I tell him. “I hope you find a good wife and have many beautiful children.” He smiles broadly, shakes my hand, and then kisses me on the left and then the right cheek. I bend to kiss little Hassan.

We left Baghdad by overland route to Amman. A herd of camels, one hundred and fifty raced our Suburban, which cruised at 150 kph. They lost. Nobody passed us in ten hours on the road. From Amman by plane to Rome and four days of meetings in the Vatican, first with Archbishop Renato Martino and Dr. Giorgio Filibeck at the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. Cardinal Stafford for the Council for the Laity was very encouraging in an extended telephone conversation. We were received graciously by Monsignor Khaled Akasheh at the Council for Inter-religious Dialogue in charge of relations with Islam who asked us to try to make the American people more aware of what really motivates Muslims, and to let Muslim leaders know that we have
great sympathy and respect for them. We met too with Father Augustine DeNoia at the

Council for the Doctrine of the Faith. No one spoke for attribution but only “for background.” No one in the Vatican is defending the proposed attack on Iraq. Archbishop Martino told us to look for Pope John Paul’s statement due on the 13th of January. He said it would be startling. It was the clearest condemnation of the proposed war yet! The bottom-line in Vatican political thinking is that the U.S. is threatening the fabric of international law which is a sine qua non of any lasting international peace.

We brought up the question, is there ever a duty, as well as a right, to disobey? Gaudium et spes, of the Second Vatican Council, numbers 79-81 and Evangelium Vitae, John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical which uses the term conscientious objection for the first time in a authoritative document, explicitly in the context of abortion and euthanasia, clearly indicate that this is so. Then what if an American service man or woman forms his or her conscience on the basis of explicit teachings of the Church and comes to the conclusion that military service is no longer justifiable, either in general or in a particular instance: does the Church then have an obligation toward that individual? The answer, go to your bishops in the States, ask them, go to the Military Ordinariate, to Bishop O’Brien! All right. We will go and ask them to follow through on the promise they made upon the re-institution of registration for Selective Service to make the good offices of Catholic agencies available to the support of any and everyone who comes forward with a problem of any kind in regard to military service or the draft ( USCC Administrative Committee, 1980).

The Community of Sant’Egidio Vesper Service at the Church of Santa Maria in Trastevere had three hundred and fifty people on a Thursday night, a fifth of
them black Africans, with Asians and men and women in equal proportion. Another
group of younger adults and adolescents was meeting at the same time. One of their
leaders, a specialist in Middle Eastern affairs, Claudio Betti, invited a couple of community members, Baxter and me to his apartment for supper. Ideas crackled like Roman candles. Sant’Egidio is the closest thing to the Catholic Worker I have found anywhere, serving the very poor by direct outreach and putting into practice the theory of nonviolence, but it is organized, rational, and gets things done. They agreed that Africa is the touchstone of globalization, that black Africa is heading to disaster, not just because of AIDS but because neo-liberal globalization is marginalizing whole nations on that continent. Claudio agreed that most of the world acts as if it would prefer that black Africa simply disappear, just as white America would prefer to wake up one day and find that our marginalized non-white population had simply vanished.

Most of the community’s work is practical, down to earth, and they are prayerful, recognizing the primacy of the spiritual. They are serious about reading the true mind of the Church and putting into practice the imperatives of justice and peace that have been defined as constitutive elements in the “new” evangelization since the 1971 Synod of Bishops. We can learn something from them.

The pending war is not inevitable. Can the President ignore the will of such a large cross-section of the people, of a quarter of a million people in D.C. on January 18, and as many more in smaller demonstrations across the country, of world public opinion, of Pope John Paul in Rome and the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in Istanbul and the Primate of the Anglican Communion Rowan Williams in Canterbury and almost all the religious leadership across the globe?

The President bullies France and Germany and the United Nations, deploys more troops, aircraft carriers, heavy equipment, over one hundred thousand troops, as many more on the way. The sleight of hand that threatens to turn the “war on terrorism” into a war upon Iraq will enflame the Arab world and one billion Muslims around the globe. Pakistan’s government may well fall. Eighty percent of Turkey’s people oppose the war. A ripple effect in the entire region is not unlikely. Hatred of Israel will mount. The world economy may not revive but reverse. Terrorist groups will see a flood of recruits eager to outdo September 11 in slaugher. Our civil liberties may never recover. Every stated goal of the war policy is undermined by its pursuit.

Can the President imagine the huge masses of people who would come out into the streets if he bombs Iraq? Can he imagine how he would keep the government running if the American people clog its machinery with our own bodies?

The people may have stopped this war. I want to believe it. God grant it! Insh’Allah! Pray for Iraq, for the children, and pray for our country. We need prayers even more than the Iraqis. It is no sin to die. It is a sin to murder.