Mother and Daughter (photo: Alan Pogue)

David Smith-Ferri, of Voices in the Wilderness, answers the question of why there was a need for a Army Lt, a Reserve Captain, and a retired Army Colonel to hatch “the idea of soliciting donations of medical journals to help” Iraqis. This is a story of “American goodwill and generosity”, that “is nonetheless wrapped in irony, thick and layered.”

By David Smith-Ferri

By any measure of meteorological activity, the last two years have been a season of foul weather for US soldiers and their families. One storm after another, and long-term forecasts for more of the same. Sent into Afghanistan and Iraq in the emotional wake of 9/11, commissioned to liberate people from tyranny and to protect Americans from terrorist attacks, they find themselves instead fighting a never-ending guerilla war, the moral handholds of which are as difficult to locate and as unreliable as a trail in a sandstorm. Innocent civilians, including children, are inevitably dying at their hands. The majority of Iraqis, the people they came to liberate, want them to leave. A majority of Americans believe the invasion was a mistake, and yet here they are fighting in its aftermath, forced into extended deployments, and risking their lives and their sanity. They fight for a Commander-in-Chief who fails to attend their funerals, and for an Administration that bans the photographing of their body bags. They are haunted by a ghastly prisoner abuse scandal, the ghosts of which continue to howl, and by the complete collapse of the Administration’s house-of-cards rationale for war. They work for an organization where a high-ranking official can talk about the joy of killing without being censored or reprimanded. In increasing numbers, they return home physically injured and/or psychologically traumatized. And all around them in Iraq, they are faced with irrefutable evidence of the futility of their mission: the unflagging resistance/insurgency and the unbreakable chains of Iraqi enslavement to poverty, unemployment, ill health, and insecurity, an enslavement which utterly discredits any claims of “liberation.” Who can blame them if their time in Iraq becomes little more than an intense game of survival.

By Peggy Gish
Christian Peacemaker Teams

The agenda for our first CPT post-training meeting with the fledgling Muslim Peacemaking Team (MPT) in Kerbala, seemed pretty straightforward and functional. The group proceeded to establish a coordinating committee to move the group toward establishing their goals and bylaws and plan for facilitating another nonviolence training for students and staff at the Al Uhl Beit University in Kerbala. One long-range goal mentioned was to spread MPT throughout Iraq, and even beyond to other areas of the world.

Then, what we thought would be a quick discussion of a suggestion for their consideration, turned into an animated time of serious searching and sharing. Cliff Kindy shared about CPT in Hebron and Israeli groups helping to rebuild homes of Palestinians that had been demolished. He went on to say that the Iraq CPT team is exploring the possibility of helping a refugee family from Falluja rebuild their destroyed home and invited the MPT group to join them if that worked out.