Ed Kinane
Voices in The Wilderness
Baghdad
September 29, 2003

Letters to the Editor
The Syracuse Post-Standard

Dear Rep. James Walsh,

Via the Post-Standard website I learn that you’ve been visiting Iraq. I try to imagine what this must be like for you. When you venture out of the Coalition Provisional Authority’s armored bubble, I picture you always attended by CPA handlers and translators. And by men with guns.

Your experience of Iraq and of the Iraqi people will inevitably be a world apart from that of those of us working here without such accompaniment. It will be a world apart from that of those of us who work and live among Iraqis.

Quite frankly, I fear that your experience here will be selective and contrived, that you will come home enmeshed in the U.S. military’s point of view. After all, given your position on the House Appropriations Committee, the military has a stake in what you see and hear and whom you talk to. There are many voices here the military would find inconvenient for you to hear.

I fear that your five days in this diverse and complex country will give you little understanding of what it has been like to be an Iraqi under decades of U.S.-supported dictatorship (in which tens, maybe hundreds — of thousands of Iraqis were murdered). Or under 13 years of U.S.-enforced sanctions (under which hundreds of thousands of Iraqis met premature death). Or under a U.S. invasion (in which thousands of Iraqi civilians and draftees were slaughtered). Or under a highly-militarized occupation (in which human rights abuses are rife and under which Iraqis have no say in who governs them).

The September 23 Post-Standard quotes you saying prior to coming here, What we’re trying to do is get Iraq’s oil production up so they can pay for some of the cost. What costs are you referring to and how will that cost be fairly allocated? Is it the cost of occupying their country? Is it the cost of reparations for families of the maimed and slain? Is it the cost of re-building a bomb-shattered Iraq?

In any case, why should the victims, the Iraqi people, have their resources looted to pay the massive expense others incur? My hope, Mr. Congressman, is that your conscience won’t permit you to ratify any scheme or military budget further violating the people of Iraq.

Ed Kinane
Ed is a human rights worker with Voices in the Wilderness in Baghdad [www.vitw.org]. He returns to Syracuse November 10.