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An Open Letter on Iraq -Philip Steger, Director of Friends for a Non-Violent World

Editors Note: While the main mission of the SJA website is building community within our parish, we on occasion run articles that we feel are of interest to the parish based on where we are on our community journey. In light of Kathy Kelly's recent homily on Iraq, parishioner Kate Smith sent the website the following Open Letter to the American People by Mr. Philip Steger, Director of Friends for a Non-Violent World. Mr. Steger spent 10 days in Iraq this summer and is speaking at the 9/11 Noon Commemoration at Loring Park. Here are his thoughts on Iraq. Thank you Kate.

Having just spent ten days in Iraq, where I drank tea and talked with people in cafes, walked the streets, browsed in the souks, rode in cabs, spent a night as a guest in the home of a poor family, and met with doctors, their patients and, since most of these were children, their patients’ parents, I can tell you first-hand that a U.S. military strike against Saddam Hussein will deliver the might of the American people against the unprotected head and belly of the people of Iraq. Whether Saddam Hussein will be within a thousand miles of these strikes is doubtful. What’s certain is that the bones of Iraqi society, brittle after twenty years of war and twelve years of modern times’ most punitive embargo, will simply shatter, and no “nation-building” ambitions of the American government or the UN will put them back together again.

Ordinary Iraqis are trapped by inescapable dependencies. They depend utterly on the Iraqi government and the UN for energy, food, water, sanitation, health care and education. Cut off the head that makes the hand feed the mouth and you kill the body. But President Bush seems devoted to a doctrine that is the reverse of this fact: kill the body and you just may knock off the head while you’re at it.

During Desert Storm, the U.S. and its allies attacked Iraqi energy, water and sanitation. These, along with food, health care and education further deteriorated into disaster under sanctions, leading to a sudden doubling of infant and childhood mortality rates. UNICEF describes the effects of the last twelve years in their newly published report, The Situation of Children in Iraq, 2002: “The past decade has witnessed the emergence of a large body of wasted, stunted and impoverished children, in violation of the right to life and survival”. The body’s dying while the head still survives.

The tenacity, ingenuity and hard-work of the Iraqi labor force, with the help the Iraqi government and the Oil for Food Program, has started to put Iraq back together again, stabilizing, but not reversing, the de-development of Iraq in all areas except for education and cancer rates and recovery. If this rehabilitation effort is interrupted, and there is no reason to believe that if the U.S. attacked infrastructure in 1991 merely in order to get Iraqi troops out of Kuwait, then they will not attack it again in order to destroy the Iraqi government, all but a small percentage of 23 million Iraqis will be without clean water, electricity, sanitation and medical care. In 1991, Iraqis had a cushion. The government had invested in the best capital money could buy. The components and engineering of the infrastructure was top of the line and they had stockpiled plenty of reserves. Although these were used up by 1994, they mitigated for a while the effects of the bombings and the embargo. There is now no such cushion. There are no reserves. The equipment they currently have, because of their sanctions-squeezed cash flow, is the cheapest money can buy. Whatever infrastructure they have will burn like dandelion puff, and there will be nothing to replace it.

Of equal consequence, the Iraqi people depend upon a food ration provided and distributed by the Iraqi government supplied by Oil for Food money. This ration is more than 90% of most Iraqi’s calorie sources. Since Iraqi need is so great and diverse, and since Oil for Food provides this ration, most of the rest of Oil for Food money and contracts has been invested in oil, electricity, water and sanitation, not food production. If this ration is interrupted, there is no domestic replacement for it. There will be no food for millions of people and their children. According to one spokesperson for UNICEF, who looked at me with disbelief when I asked what this would mean for the Iraqi people(a reaction everyone across Iraq would repeat, since the answers are so obvious to anyone who takes the time to consider the question), this means famine.

I got a hint of this before I even set foot in Iraq. On arrival in Amman, Jordan, from which we staged our entry into Iraq, I met with our Iraqi driver, a gentle, handsome, former civil engineer named Sattar. After greeting each other, we went up to the cafe in our hotel for some tea to catch up. After inquiring about other American friends and telling me with uncontained pride about how his nine-year-old daughter Marwa had passed the third grade with the highest marks, he asked me, “Philip, what is happening in America? We don’t get CNN. We don’t know what’s going to be done to us.”

I had to tell him. “Sattar,” I said, “Our President is determined to attack you. Not by air, but on the ground. He wants to replace the president (Saddam Hussein), and he’s doing everything he can to make this happen.” He stared past my shoulder. I imagine he was watching himself frantically search for Marwa among the fire and rubble. Then, in a very measured, quiet, but helpless voice he said, “They will kill so many people. And they will fail.”

President Bush’s argument for war on Iraq (I can’t believe that he projects the will of the informed American people in this) is deeply and fatally flawed. Taking the will to possess weapons of mass destruction to be equivalent to the use of weapons of mass destruction, despite the immediate end that would mean for Saddam Hussein, his power, his palaces and his people, and failing to provide any credible evidence that Iraq was in any way connected to 9-11, President Bush is demanding that the U.S. do the equivalent of atomic bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with neither Pearl Harbor, nor World War II happening first. Simply out of the blue.

It is time for the American people - that means you, me, all of us - to take responsibility for ourselves. The people are sovereign, not the President. The American people do not destroy other nations and their people based upon one man’s fallible assessment of what that nation might do to us in the future. For the sake of Sattar and Marwa, and the millions of Iraqi moms, dads and kids they represent, for the sake of American moral integrity, please use your freedom now to tell the President, his Cabinet, our Senators and Representatives to take us off this course. Tell them that we must use diplomacy and negotiation; that we must honestly use weapons inspectors; that we must help to rebuild Iraqi civil society and show that we do support the Iraqi people! These can avert war, prevent news cycles of terror and prepare the way for long-term stability and peace.

War, famine, pestilence and death. These are not the horses that Americans ride. Call the President and your representatives now, while they are readying the saddles.

Editors Note: If you are interested in hearing more about the recent trip to Iraq, consider attending the following: Minnesotans Tell Story of Visit to Iraq. Wednesday, Septermber 4th at 7:00 pm. Panel presentation by Minnesota Iraq Team. Five Minnesotans who traveled to Iraq from July 25-August 8 will share their experiences at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, 2730 E, 31st Street, Minneapolis. Parking in the church parking lot on East Lake Street and 28th Avenue. Info: 612.522.1861