By Kathy Kelly

Dear President Bush:

Recently you stated that the President of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, would do well to open Iraq to inspectors looking for weapons of mass destruction (WOMD). Many commentators said that because your administration was unable to link Iraq in any way to the tragedy of September 11, you were looking for some other reason to threaten Iraq. You will remember that you were asked what would happen if Saddam Hussein did not admit inspectors. “He’ll find out,” you replied in words worthy of the great American Western.

We are five Americans writing to you from Baghdad, Iraq. We are the forty-first delegation of Voices in the Wilderness to have come to Iraq in the last five years. And we are, in an amazing way, the U.S. citizens who have most taken your concern for WOMD to heart. We want you to know, Mr. President, that like the forty delegations before us, we share your opposition to WOMD.

So perhaps it is not surprising that we have responded to your concern that there be inspections for WOMD here in Iraq. Instead of celebrating the holidays at home, we came here to search for such weapons. All of our delegations to Iraq have indeed discovered that such a weapon does exist. We see it constantly in use when we visit the children’s wards in hospitals across this country. We know its horrible power when we confront the uncontested United Nations statistics: hundreds of thousands of little children have died as a direct result of the sanctions the U.S. has maintained against Iraq for over eleven years. This WOMD is capable not only of taking lives on a scale beyond anything done in Hiroshima, but of isolating a people from the rest of the world and slowly destroying their hope.

Recently, Mr. President, you warned all who are planning “to murder innocent people” that “America will be breathing down their neck.” You have in your power to bring a swift end to the murder of innocents. As we come to the celebration of Christmas and tell again the story of how the fearful King Herod took the lives of the innocent children of Bethlehem, we implore you to choose a different course. What good has ever come from the slaughter of the innocent?

Be bold, Mr. President. Let the innocent children of Iraq live. End the economic sanctions at once. Put the great political, economic and moral energy of the United States into the long-delayed United Nations call to work for regional disarmament in this part of the world.

Sincerely,

Kathy Kelly