Coloradoan Writes from Iraq: The Work of Making Miracles

by Elizabeth Roberts

BAGHDAD, DEC. 12, 2002


I am in back in Baghdad after an absence of two weeks, here to bear
witness to the reality of the Iraqi people, “standing in solidarity”
with their suffering. But today it doesn’t seem like enough. I don’t
want to simply bear witness, I want to walk on water for them, raise the
dead, multiply the loaves and fishes. I want a miracle. I want the
United States not to attack, not to fall back on the barbaric use of
violence and war to achieve its ends. I want the American people to
continue to rise up against this most dangerous undertaking. I want to
see a thousand U.S. and British women and men walking the streets of
Baghdad with white armbands, carrying placards protesting the imminent
attack on Iraq. I want a miracle. Can we set aside our appointments, our
jobs, our busy schedules for a short time to amass a visible presence
here, showing our support for a nonviolent alternative? Former President
Jimmy Carter said in his speech the other night accepting the Nobel
Peace Prize, “sometimes war may be a necessary evil, but we must
remember, it is always an evil.”  

In this case it is an evil we can stop before it starts and becomes
intractable. I am not naive. Like most of you I have spent months trying
to fathom the real reason the Bush administration is so determined to
wage war on Iraq. There are many theories: oil, terrorism, Israel’s
security, weapons of mass destruction, a clash of civilizations,
redrawing maps. All of these give way in the face of reasonable
assessment: 1) We can negotiate to buy the oil we need; 2) Iraq has not
convincingly been shown to be involved in terrorist actions; 3) Iraq
will never be able to match U.S. power with its pathetic arsenal – if it
still has one anyway – and there are better ways to contain, reduce, or
eradicate any possible threat they hold; 4) Israel is the country in
this part of the world with weapons of mass destruction; 5) The war
isn’t about Islam – American policy claims not to care about religion –
and in any case Iraq is (or was until we pushed so hard) the most
secular state in the Arab world; 6) And it won’t be about maps either
since the current fragmented state of the Arab world serves American
interests just fine. Then what?

Add them all together and the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
Imperialism is what we called it in school when talking about the great
rapacious empires of Rome, the Ottomans, Portugal, Spain, or England.
Could it be that an occupation of Iraq is the next step in the emergence
of the greatest empire in history? Is this our country’s goal for the
21st century? Is it something we want to accept as long as the loot
reaches our tables and our automobiles?  

Clearly I must be overwrought and too emotional. But I grew up believing
that my country was the great defender of freedom and democracy. I am
dismayed at being so deceived.  

Perhaps my feelings have been stimulated by Elias’s and my recent
experiences at the Convening Conference of the global Nonviolent
Peaceforce last week. We travelled from Baghdad to Delhi, India, to meet
with 140 people from 47 nations to take the next steps in building the
first large scale “force” committed to nonviolence since Gandhi’s
inspiration for the creation of a “Peace Army”, or shanti sena as he
called it. 
The aim of the Nonviolent Peaceforce is simple: to bring an end to
military violence by non-violent means, creating a diplomatic space for
armed conflicts to be resolved without resorting to further violence. To
this end the Peaceforce plans to create an unarmed standing peace
brigade of (ultimately) 2,000 civilians from around the world trained in
specific techniques to intervene nonviolently in international,
interethnic, or inter-religious conflicts. A response network of over
5,000 people around the world will support those in conflict areas by
communicating their progress through a worldwide network of monitoring
systems comprised of video, phone, and Internet. Our current Peace Team
in Iraq is a small-scale precursor of this type of “3rd Party
Intervention” – along with other similar efforts such as Peace Brigades
International, Christian Peacemaker Teams, and Witness for Peace.   

The Peaceforce Convening Conference in Delhi was opened with men and
women translating into their own languages the proverb, “The path is
made by walking.” A great exercise in cultural understanding. My
favorite was the Korean translation: “If we walk and walk and walk,
people will call it a road.” And so we are walking. 

The five-day conference was not easy. There was much suspicion about the
Peaceforce’s origins as the brainchild of three North American men. Was
this yet another form of Western imperialism? Here we have the U.S.
causing so much conflict and suffering in the world and now in come “the
U.S. heroes on white horses to try and fix it,” as one Asian delegate
put it. This distrust was not just an undercurrent. It was upfront and
genuinely felt. Those of us from the U.S., Canada, and Europe found
ourselves in the position of trying to share the insights gained with
the participation of dozens of co-workers from other countries during
three years of research and development while constantly being asked to
let go of what we think we know.

The plan for the Nonviolent Peaceforce had always been to come to this
stage and turn it over to its “Member Organizations” from around the
world. We all had to share the dream. After much struggle, the
impossible happened. 140 people worked together without complete
knowledge or mutual understanding and made the decisions necessary to
make the Nonviolent Peaceforce truly a global reality, and responsible
to grassroots organizations around the world. A colleague from Singapore
said he had never seen a more diverse people’s peace gathering. In the
end it was people’s good will that overcame their distrust. As a woman
from Kenya said, “We agree to disagree and still keep walking the road
to nonviolent resolution of conflicts – the need is too great not to.”
Together we accepted the reality that we were certain to make mistakes
and to mis-communicate, but our children and grandchildren’s lives
demanded that we try. One of my personal practices during this
conference was on being told I was wrong to continue to smile and to ask
how it could be better, rather than using my wit to reply.  

After this meeting I firmly believe that the dream we all hold for a
different world is not impossible. I see this dream being worked on in
thousands of ways at the local level and it gives me much hope. Now we
must learn how to make it possible at a larger scale. The work of our
politicians, businesspeople and diplomats is to ask how they can serve
the peoples’ dream. Anything else has always failed – empires made of
dust litter this Iraqi landscape: Mesopotamia, Assyria, Babylonia. One
feels the fleeting nature of the will to dominance.

I believe the American people have a choice to make now. We can watch
our environment and our civilizational structures crumble violently –
the evidence is already visible on every continent and it will only
speed up. Or we can become the transformative agent, mobilizing the good
will of the world’s people to work together on our collective task of
healing the world. 

Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually
changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly 
building new structures”
– John F. Kennedy 

What is taking place in the U.S. build-up to war in Iraq flies in the
face of this wisdom. There is no more urgent problem today than
preventing this war. Here it all comes together: the geopolitical
balance, our response to a declining environment, the possible triumph
of fundamentalism over tolerance and diversity, a reasonable peace for
Israel/Palestine, economic futures for billions of people, U.S. security
at home and abroad.

What will we choose? I work – and pray – for a miracle. Please add your
prayers and actions too, in whatever ways you can. 


NOTES:
1. If you want to join the Iraq Peace Team, see www.iraqpeaceteam.org.  
2. Many people have asked for permission to send these letters on to
others, or to print them in journals and newsletters. Please feel free
to do so (we retain copyright). We would appreciate hearing where they
are re-printed. 
3. If this letter has been forwarded to you and you would like to
receive them regularly, please send a note asking to be on the LETTERS
FROM THE ROAD mailing list to eliasamidon@earthlink.net.

* Elizabeth Roberts  and her partner, Elias Amidon, both from Boulder, Colorado, are in Iraq for two months as part of the Iraq Peace Team.