By Ramzi Kysia

It was in a cold, dark room in Basra, lit only by lamplight, that I fully realized that George Bush is insane.

I was in Iraq with Voices in the Wilderness, a U.S.-based campaign to end sanctions. The house belonged to the al-Saraji family in Jumhuriya, one of Basra’s poorest neighborhoods. Raw sewage runs through open trenches on the street. There’s no running water, and they have electricity only half the day. 25 people live in 6 rooms: Salah and his children, Ali and Humdia and their children, Salah & Ali’s younger brothers and sisters, and presiding over them all with quiet dignity, Salah’s wife, Um Heider.

Heider Salah al-Saraji was killed, along with 16 other human beings, when a precision-guided U.S. missile hit their neighborhood on January 25, 1999. Heider was 6 years old.

Iraq is where Civilization began: the Fertile Crescent, home of Mesopotamia, Sumeria, Babylon and Ur. From Iraq came written language, and mathematics. The word “urban” comes from the first city, Ur. The intersection of the Tigris and Euphrates is the fabled location of the Garden of Eden. This is the land of Ibrahim, the sprouting ground for our major religions. Yet our struggle today is to convince George Bush that the history of Iraq didn’t begin, and shouldn’t be forced to end, with Saddam Hussein.

We stayed with Um Heider’s family for 3 days, and watched them live and laugh with one another. I saw them in their daily lives, and realized that family is God’s greatest blessing. What a catastrophe it is to steal a child from his family.

There is no such thing as “collateral damage” but the death of entire worlds.

Salah’s eyes grow teary when he talks about Heider. Um Heider sobs. “He was my favorite,” she says, “because he was the smartest, the funniest, and the best of all my children.” Their oldest children, Hind and Hamza, just look sad. Mustapha, now 6 years old himself and normally about as controllable as an earthquake, quiets down when the talk turns to his lost brother. Mustapha was maimed, and lost half of one hand, in the 1999 bombing.

Then the conversation turns to Hamza’s ribbon for Qur’an reading, or Hind’s excellent marks in school, and Mustapha does something silly and we all laugh. And suddenly, for a moment, it’s okay.

The war with Iran robbed this family of two brothers, and damaged their once thriving city of Basra. Carpet bombing during the second Gulf War in 1991 turned damage into devastation, and sanctions since have impoverished everyone. America’s so-called “pinprick” bombings, under their self-imposed “No-Fly-Zones,” stole one son and maimed another. But life and family remain, and with them comfort and the hope of peace.

The Iraqi people, in my experience, have a strength of family and a faith in God that is unrivaled by anything America can offer. This is civilization. For all its wealth and power, the only thing the West shows the world today is decadence and raw barbarism.

After 20 years of almost constant war, George “John Wayne” Bush says he has the answer to all of Iraq’s problems: more war. Maybe that’s the answer to George Bush’s problems. Bush is living out some sort of adolescent male fantasy (and don’twe all wish it was the same sort as Bill Clinton had) where, as in the war he avoided serving in Vietnam, America is going to destroy the world “in order to save it.” Over 50,000 American soldiers were killed in Vietnam. That was a tragedy. Over 2 million Vietnamese were killed, and that was a bloody slaughter.

“Why?” Salah asked me, “Why they do like this? Why?”

The simple answer is that “they” are insane. From Israel to India to America, everywhere we are faced with governments that are out of control, and quite obviously out of their minds.

We are being inexorably pushed to war by mad governments. To oppose them will be costly. But to fail will cost even more. We the peoples of this world must rise up, for the love of God, and in the love of peace, and prevent the insane from leading us to our destruction.

“I have set before you life and death, and I have begged you to choose life for the sake of your children.” Such was the plea Deuteronomy attributed to God. Today it’s a demand we must shout to a world grimly celebrating its own self- destruction: choose life, choose life, for the sake of all of our children - we must choose life.