Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: sanctions

  • Rebalancing the World

    It may turn out that May 17, 2010 will be remembered as an important milestone on the road to a real new world order.  Remember that the phrase ‘new world order’ came to prominence in 1990 after Iraq’s invasion and annexation of Kuwait. It was used by George W. H. Bush, the elder of the two Bush presidents, to signify the possibility after the end of the Cold War to find a consensus within the UN Security Council enabling a unified response to aggressive war. The new world order turned out to be a mobilizing idea invoked for a particular situation, and not the beginning of a new framework for collective security. The United States did not want to create expectations that it would always be available to lead a coalition against would be breakers of world peace. The apparent commitment, and even the language, of a ‘new world order’ disappeared altogether from American diplomacy right after the First Gulf War of 1991. What one wonders now is whether the Brazilian/Turkish effort to resolve the Iran nuclear crisis with the West is not more genuinely expressive of a changing global setting, perhaps leading this time to something durable–a ‘real new world order.’

    May 17th was the day that the Brazilian/Turkish initiative bore fruit in Tehran, with Iran agreeing to a ten-point arrangement designed to defuse the mounting confrontation with the United States and Israel with regard to its enrichment facilities. The essence of the deal was that Iran would ship 1200 kilograms of low enriched uranium (LEU) to Turkey for deposit, and receive in return 120 kilograms of uranium enriched to 20% for use in an Iranian  nuclear reactor devoted to medical research. The agreement reaffirmed support for the Non-Proliferation Treaty, as well as acknowledged Iran’s right under the treaty to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, which meant the entire fuel cycle, including the enrichment phase.

    The bargain negotiated in Tehran closely resembled an arrangement provisionally reached some months earlier at the initiative of the International Atomic Energy Agency in which Iran had agreed to turn over a similar amount of low enriched uranium to France and Russia in exchange for their promise of providing fuel rods that could be used in the same medical research reactor. That 2009 deal floundered when Iran raised political objections, and then withdrew. The United States had initially welcomed this earlier arrangement as a desirable confidence-building step toward resolving the underlying conflict with Iran, but it wasted no time repudiating the May 17th agreement, which seemed so similar in its content.

    How should we understand this discrepancy in the American response? It is true that in recent months Iran has increased its LEU production, making 1200 kg of its existing stockpile amount to 50% of its total rather than the 80% that would have been transferred in the earlier arrangement. Also, there were some unspecified features in the May 17th plan, including how the enriched uranium would be provided to Iran, and whether there would be a system of verification as to its use to produce medical isotopes. In this regard, it would have seemed appropriate for Washington, if genuinely troubled by this, for Washington to express its substantive concerns, such as requesting Iran to transfer a larger quantity of LEU and to spell out the details, but this is not what happened.

    Instead of welcoming this notable effort to reduce regional tensions, which it had once encouraged, the Brazilian/Turkish initiative was immediately branded as an amateurish irrelevance by the American Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton. She insisted that the concerns about Iranian nuclear enrichment be left exclusively in the hands of the ‘major powers,’ and immediately rallied China and Russia (in addition to France and the United Kingdom) to support a fourth round of punitive sanctions that were to be presented to the UN Security Council in the near future.  It now appears that the five permanent members of the Security Council will support this intensification of sanctions that is expected to call for an arms embargo on heavy weapons, travel restrictions on Iranian officials, a boycott of banks and companies listed as linked to Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, and a provocative authority to search ships to and from Iran suspected of carrying prohibited items. Such a resolution if implemented would certainly increase tensions in the Middle East without any discouragement of the Iranian nuclear program.  Indeed a new round of sanctions would almost certainly increase Iran’s incentives to exercise its full rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and complete its development of the complete fuel cycle as has been previously done by several other parties to the treaty, including Japan, Germany, The Netherlands, and ironically, Brazil.

    Given the generally constructive character of the agreement reached in Tehran, the uncompromisingly hostile reaction in Washington can only be understood in one of two ways, neither of which is reassuring. If the U.S. Government, with or without Israeli prodding, had already resolved to impose sanctions, then a tension-reducing development of this sort would weaken the case for this coercive approach and needed to be somehow undermined. All indications point to a conclusion that the United States was determined to go forward with sanctions, and was unpleasantly surprised when it suddenly became clear on May 17th that a credible deal had been negotiated. So long as the Brazil/Turkey initiative was given no chance of success, it was encouraged as a way to reinforcing the impression that Iran was not interested in a diplomatic solution, and the political atmosphere would be supportive of moves to tighten anti-Iranian sanctions. When it turned out that the U.S. had guessed wrong, and that the Brazilian/Turkish diplomacy would reach a positive outcome, the American leadership shifted course, and seemed to blame for Brasilia and Ankara for interfering in a policy domain where thy lacked experience and leverage.  The Brazilians gave the lie to this posturing by Washington when Lula released Obama’s letter of April 20, 2010 in which a green light had been given to the Brazil/Turkey diplomatic effort to find a breakthrough that would reduce tensions and calm the region.

    Perhaps, the more weighty explanation of the hostile response has to do with the changing cast of players in the geopolitical power game. If this reasoning is correct, then the United States angry response was intended to deliver a public reprimand to Brazil and Turkey, warning them to leave questions pertaining to nuclear weapons in the hands of what Hilary Clinton called ‘the major powers.’ In effect, the non-Western world should have no say in shaping global security policy, and any attempt to do so would be rebuffed in the strongest possible terms. Here, too, it was probably felt that this lesson could be indirectly given through the anticipated Iranian rejection of the proposed new arrangement. When this didn’t transpire, then the United States would have had to cede graciously part of the geopolitical stage, or do what it decided to do, and try to slap down the upstart Brazilians and Turks. Perhaps, it might have accepted the outcome had it not meant also giving up its plan to rely on enhanced sanctions.  

    The world of 2010 is very different from what it was in the late 20th century. Globalization, the decline of American power, and the rise of non-Western states have changed the landscape. This process has recently accelerated as a result of the world economic crisis, and the unresolved difficulties in the Euro zone. As the famous Bob Dylan 1960’s song goes, “The times, they are a-changing.” Recall that it was not long ago that the G-8 was scrapped in favor of the more inclusive G-20. Recently, as well, much attention has been given to the rise of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries. What seems most at stake in this attempt to supersede and nullify the Iran deal is banishing the Brazilian and Turkish intruders from the geopolitical playing field. For the West to claim that the Security Council remains remotely representative of the arrangement of power in 2010 is ludicrous. The identity of the five permanent members made some sense in 1945 following World War II, but today it is unquestionably anachronistic due to its failure to take any account of the fundamental shifts in world power that have taken place in recent decades. Brazil and Turkey were recently elected to be non-permanent two-year members of the Security Council, and have justified their selection by pursuing active and independent paths to a more secure and peaceful world. The old guard in world politics should have congratulated the Brazilians and Turks for succeeding where they had failed rather than complaining, and should have settled for defusing tensions rather than seeking their intensification, but this is not the world we are living in.

    Further, this is not just a childish ploy by to grab a few headlines and tweak the old guard. The confrontation with Iran is exceedingly dangerous, agitated by Israel’s periodic threats of launching a military attack and reports of pushing hard on the United States behind the scenes to move toward exercising the military option that, in Beltway jargon, has never been taken off the table. This prevailing strategy of tension could easily produce a devastating regional war, disrupting the world economy, and causing widespread human suffering. Both Brazil and Turkey have strong national interests in working for regional peace and security, and one way to do this is to calm the diplomatic waters, especially in relation to Iran’s contested nuclear program. The fact that Iran seems prepared to go ahead with the agreement, at least if the UN refrains from further sanctions, argues for giving the deal a chance to succeed, or at worst, working to make the LEU transfer more reassuring to those countries that suspect Iran of secretly planning to become a nuclear weapons state.

    The concern about Iran seems genuine in many quarters, given the inflammatory language sometimes used by President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and considering the repressive internal practices in Iran. At the same time, even in this regard the United States leadership has rather dirty hands. While insisting that Iran cannot be allowed to do what several other non-nuclear states have already done in conformity with Non-Proliferation Treaty, the United States has acknowledged that it has been engaged in a variety of destabilizing military activities under Pentagon auspices within Iranian territory. (For confirmation see Mark Mazzeti, “U.S. Is Said to Expand Secret Actions in Mideast,” NY Times, May 24, 2010). Also, it is impossible to overlook the dispiriting silence that has long insulated Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal from scrutiny and censure, as well as the closely related refusal of the Western powers to back proposals put forward by Egypt and others for a nuclear free Middle East.

    Back in 2003 Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of Defense, made headlines by contrasting ‘Old Europe’ (especially France and Germany) that he denigrated as decadent because it opposed the invasion of Iraq, and ‘New Europe’ that was supposed to be the flourishing wave of the future in Eastern Europe that favored American policy. Now it is Old Europe that is again partnering with the United States, and so restored to the good graces of Washington. In this sense, Brazil and Turkey are being treated as geopolitical trespassers because of their refusal to absent themselves from any further engagement in Middle East diplomacy.

    We seem to be witnessing the passing of an era in world politics, which has yet to be acknowledged. It is two decades since Charles Krauthammer, writing in Foreign Affairs, declared that “The immediate post-Cold War world is not multipolar. It is unipolar. The center of world power is the unchallenged superpower, the United States, attended by its Western allies.” The abrupt rejection of the Brazil/Turkey initiative can probably best understood as a nostalgic clinging by Obama’s Washington to the ‘unipolar moment’ long after its reality has passed into history, at lease with respect to nuclear weapons policy, including administering the non-proliferation regime. The U.S. Government has been more flexible in other substantive areas, so far encouraging reliance on the G-20 and treating the BRIC countries as virtual partners in the Copenhagen climate change high-level conference of last December.

    Turkey has already demonstrated the enormous gains for itself and the region arising by the pursuit of an independent and activist foreign policy based on resolving conflicts and reducing tensions to the extent possible, with benefits for itself and its neighbors as measured by peace, stability, and prosperity.  Not all of its initiatives have met with success. It tried to encourage the world to treat Hamas as a political actor after it fairly won elections in Gaza back in January 2006, but was rebuffed by Washington and Tel Aviv. Similarly, it brought to bear its mediating skill in trying to broker a peace deal between Israel and Syria, only to have the process break down after a series of promising negotiating rounds. Maybe also the Brazil/Turkey initiative will be effectively beaten down, but it was still definitely worth trying. For the sake of human security such governments should continue trying to supplant war and militarism with diplomacy and cooperative international relations. Outside of Western diplomatic circles it is already widely appreciated that the May 17th agreement showcases the exciting reality of a new geopolitical landscape in which the countries of the global South are now acting as subjects, being no longer content as mere objects in scenarios devised in the North. In the near future it is likely to be widely appreciated that there does exist a ‘real new world order’! At that time, the May 17th initiative might finally come into its own as the day that the North/South divide disappeared with respect to the shaping of global policy and the quest for the peaceful resolution of war-threatening conflicts.

  • The Silent War: Iraq’s Women and Children are Casualties Amid Economic Sanctions

    Originally Published by the Ventura County Reporter

    Mohamed, a recently married Iraqi friend who works in the hotel where we stay in Baghdad, is expecting a child soon. Shortly before we left nearly three weeks ago, he approached some members of our seven-member peace delegation with troubling information about his wife’s pregnancy. She will need a Cesarean section—unfortunately, on his salary, Mohamed cannot afford the operation.

    Our team feels helpless listening to Mohamed’s story amid the millions of others like it in Iraq. Even so, it isn’t wise for us to get a reputation as problem-solvers. We do what we can, but working against the United Nations-imposed economic sanctions on Iraq can often be overwhelming.

    This Iraqi clasroom may soon gain over one-third new capacity. More than 35 percent of girls drop out of primary school due to the need to help support their families.

    As a woman visiting Iraq, I often have entrance into particular social situations unfamiliar to men, like holding hands or sitting next to mothers at the hospitals that tend their sick children. I grow particularly empathetic as I imagine myself in their shoes. I know the rage I feel here in the United States toward misguided economic policies meant to target Saddam Hussein but that directly affect the most vulnerable people in society: the women and children.

    In Iraq, life for women (especially mothers) was much better prior to the United Nations sanctions, imposed in August of 1990. From 1975 to 1985, the Iraqi government invested large amounts of money in social programs, such as education and health care. A program to eradicate illiteracy among Iraqi women was exceedingly successful, and women have traditionally enjoyed freedoms not found in other contemporary Arab and Muslim countries.

    In an Oct. 1 New York Times article, Nicholas Kristof reported on the liberal attitudes toward women in Iraq. He wrote that women routinely serve in non-combat positions in the military. They pray, dine and swim together with men. Girls compete in sports as often as boys do.

    Compare these tremendous opportunities with those in neighboring countries such as Saudi Arabia, where repressive attitudes cloister women from public life into sometimes dangerous situations. In March, a group of Saudi girls was incinerated, having been denied exit from a burning building because they were not covered by a hijab, or head scarf.

    Although more openminded in its attitudes, Iraq has become decidedly more dangerous for women and children since the Gulf War due to the breakdown in medical care and especially in preventive medicine. Mohamed’s wife knows this predicament all too well.

    In Basra, where much of the Gulf War fighting transpired, 25 of the 26 obstetrics and gynecology students are women. During my first visit to Iraq in August 2001, however, I spoke with a physician at the Basra Pediatric Hospital who said that 90 percent of the women in Southern Iraq suffered from severe anemia, a health indicator with serious implications for women and children.

    Severely anemic nursing mothers cannot provide their babies adequate nutrition. Thus, even breastfeeding has become problematic during the past 12 years of economic sanctions.

    A UNICEF document from April of this year states that many Iraqi mothers have stopped breastfeeding and that only 17 percent breastfeed during their baby’s first four months. Under the Oil for Food Programme of 1995, a food basket handout for Iraqi families contains powdered formula that mothers increasingly use.

    This is problematic for many reasons, among them that the formula requires water for preparation. Nearly 62 percent of women said they report giving their babies water in the first month of life, and nearly 32 percent of the children drink unboiled water—but the water in Iraq is severely contaminated. Many of the water purification, sewage treatment and electrical facilities were bombed during the Gulf War and remain largely unrepaired and are functioning at minimal capacity for a growing nation of 24 million.

    Last fall, Thomas Nagy, a Washington, D.C. professor, released a study called The Secret Behind the Sanctions: How the U.S. Intentionally Destroyed Iraq’s Water Supply. In this paper, he details information in government documents from 1991 about how the Gulf War strategy included destroying Iraq’s civilian infrastructure, which violates Geneva Convention articles.

    “It notes,” Nagy reported, “that Iraq’s rivers ‘contain biological materials [and] pollutants and are laden with bacteria. Unless the water is purified with chlorine, epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis and typhoid could occur.’ Iraq will suffer increasing shortages of purified water because of the lack of required chemicals and desalination membranes. Incidences of disease, including possible epidemics, will become probable unless the population were careful to boil water.”

    Currently, the killer of children in Iraq is gastroenteritis, caused by drinking contaminated water. One in eight children do not see their first birthdays. Imagine the helplessness of being a mother in Iraq, knowing what life was like before the Gulf War and before economic sanctions, wanting nothing more than to be a good mother and provide a healthy, nutritious, safe life for her children.

    In a meeting with the chief medical officer at the Basra Pediatric Hospital, I inquired about the status of preventive health care for women in Iraq. His response was that there is none. This is quite remarkable for Iraq, which until 1990 had eradicated all childhood illnesses and had the most comprehensive health care system in the Middle East.

    While abysmally lacking resources and training programs, the medical field is nowhere as bleak as the education climate in Iraq, especially for young girls. More than 35 percent of girls drop out before the end of primary school due to the high price of school supplies and the need to help supplement the family’s income by going to work, likely begging.

    It seems we are condemning the women and children of Iraq to a fate similar to that of the 25 percent of American children who live in poverty, the 45 million people without health insurance and the 30,000 homeless in New York City alone.

    “Conflict is the last thing people in Iraq need,” UNICEF in Iraq reports. And when our group inquired about the potential effects of President Bush’s growing military campaign, an official at the World Food Programme office in Baghdad sighed: “The poorest people in Iraq will suffer the most.”
    *Leah C. Wells, a Santa Paula teacher, serves as peace education coordinator for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in Santa Barbara. She recently paid a second visit to Iraq and opposes the economic sanctions and no-fly-zone incursions on that country.

  • Scene of the Crime

    Iraqi President Saddam Hussein levels a sneer at the thought of combat with the United States, the specter of which looms more vivid with the seasons. His derision may visit him out of habit these days—military conflict, one area peace advocate contends, is only one more phase in a de facto war waged on the country for the better part of the last 12 years.

    “Sanctions are a form of war,” the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Leah Wells said. “Essentially, what they amount to is one in eight children not reaching their first birthday and 5,000 children a month under the age of 5 dying as a result of malnutrition and water-borne diseases.”

    The United Nations imposed numerous embargoes on fundamental goods to Iraq following its 1990 attack on Kuwait and amid speculation that Hussein is developing weapons of mass destruction.

    Wells, who will leave for Baghdad Sept. 19 on a fact-finding mission for her Santa Barbara-based nonprofit peace group, has experienced such degradation firsthand. Her trip to Iraq last August yielded the sight of raw sewage mixed with water supplies as children played around them.

    Iraq’s educational infrastructure founders under the sanctions, Wells added—an irony given the nation’s stature among world cultures.

    “That’s the area where the art of writing was invented—it’s the cradle of civilization,”Wells said. “The love of learning has always been very rich there. I’m really curious to see what the effects of this war preparation have on teachers and students.”

    Wells, 26, will return from Baghdad Sept. 29.

  • Local teacher heading to Iraq: Pacifist will study how war threats, embargoes affect schools

    Published in the Ventura County Star

    Fear is violence.

    It may not always bring physical wounds but inflicts harm just the same by paralyzing and isolating people, said Leah Wells, a Santa Paula teacher whose impending peace mission to Iraq makes her something of an expert in the matter.

    The 26-year-old pacifist said that if she allowed her journey to be detoured by the possibility of U.S. bombing, war and political coups — fears real enough that trip organizers are talking to the about half-dozen participants about the risks — she’d be on the wrong side of the battle.

    “Fear is the worst form of violence. It makes us step back from who we really are,” she said. “Life is inherently dangerous. Cave people knew that. You do what you do. You trust in the goodness of people.”

    On Thursday, Wells will take her trust and convictions on a journey aimed at studying how Iraq’s schools have been affected by war threats and 12 years of economic embargoes.

    She’ll go to Chicago, then to Jordan and finally, in a 15-hour drive, to Baghdad for about eight days in Iraq. The roundabout route is dictated by a travel sanction that means Wells and others in her group could face U.S. penalties including prison and fines — a possibility she alludes to briefly before moving on to another topic.

    The brevity may be linked to what she calls baby steps. She copes with her fears by looking at her trip as a series of moments to be taken one at a time. She’ll get on the plane, then deal with the next obstacle.

    Ask what her parents think, and Wells said they’re proud but “very, very afraid for me.”

    Ask again why she’s going.

    “Because it’s the right thing to do … because I believe really strongly in nonviolence,” she said.

    Wells, who grew up in a southern Illinois farming community, studied neuro-linguistics at Georgetown University. She got her start as peace educator about four years ago when she co-taught at a maximum-security juvenile prison near Washington, D.C. Now she works for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in Santa Barbara, teaching Solutions to Violence classes at three Ventura County high schools.

    At a continuation school in Santa Paula, students quote Gandhi and talk about ways to solve conflict in the world, school and home. The principal says Wells’ efforts were the reason there were no fights on campus last year.

    Her class is unusual. The students together make up their rules and goals. When a boy reading aloud from a pacifist essay about the Gulf War asks when he should stop, she tells him to keep going as long as he wants. When she’s in Iraq, the students may take turns leading the class.

    Wells said she does not advocate her opinions, but instead pushes the students to make their own conclusions. Some of the students think U.S. strikes against Iraq are defensible.

    “If Iraq is helping out the terrorists, they should pay consequences,” said a boy in a “Save the Planet” T-shirt.

    Another student thinks any bombing should be carefully planned to avoid civilian casualties. He calls Wells crazy for going to Iraq. She gets that a lot.

    “I feel pretty sane,” she said. “I think the people talking about war are the crazy ones.”

    She is traveling as part of a humanitarian group, Voices in the Wilderness. She joined it on a trip to Iraq last year. She saw poverty and suffering everywhere: Children playing next to canals of raw sewage; a mother watching her child die in a cancer ward that was woefully underequipped; markets displaying withered fruit so pitiful her next trip to a Ventura grocery store brought tears.

    Wells has heard schools are hurting, too. She’s been told some families will send only one child to school because they can only afford one pencil and one notebook.

    “I just want to see for myself,” she said.

    Wells doesn’t think the media covers the plight of the Iraqi people, instead fixating on Saddam Hussein and politics. She wants to collect stories and help Americans understand the inhumane impact of sanctions and threats of war on the way everyday people live.

    It’s not only a few of her students who disagree with her. She gets long, passionate e-mails from people who question her patriotism and understanding of the destruction perpetrated by Saddam. She answers them all, sometimes getting involved in long, intricate dialogues.

    Wells doesn’t support Saddam or anything connected to him. She wants the people to choose their own leader through nonviolent revolution.

    Suggest she’s idealistic, and she interprets it as a compliment. Ask about the feasibility of global peace, and she paraphrases words used by Martin Luther King Jr.:

    “The arc of the universe is long,” she said, “but it bends toward justice.”

  • Local Peace Mission Going to Baghdad

    Published in the Santa Barbara News Press

    Following her first trip to Iraq, Leah Wells returned to Santa Barbara and described how citizens of the Middle Eastern nation fared after more than a decade of international economic sanctions and embargo.

    “The people of Iraq are unable to purchase aspirin and vitamins,” she wrote shortly after the 10-day trip in July 2001. “I saw raw sewage flowing openly through the trash-lined streets and mixing with the drinking water supply. … I am convinced that if the American people know the real face of our economic and political policy toward Iraq, we would mobilize together to put an end to this.”

    More than a year later, the sanctions continue. Talk of a U.S. invasion to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein tops the news.

    And Ms. Wells, peace education coordinator at the Santa Barbara-based Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, is headed back.

    During her upcoming second trip to Iraq, the 26-year-old Santa Paula resident, who teaches nonviolence classes in Ventura schools, will study how Iraqis, mostly schoolchildren and teachers, but also other citizens, are faring under threat of war.

    “My guess,” she said, “is that the everyday threat of war is psychological warfare.”

    As she prepared to leave, the national and international debate over Iraq continued. In recent weeks, President Bush has intensified his call for regime change. Iraq appeared to soften its stance Monday. At the United Nations, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said that nearly four years after weapons inspectors left the country, Iraq had unconditionally accepted their return.

    The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation has taken a firm stance against any new military action against Iraq, and has condemned sanctions against the nation.

    Ms. Wells’ delegation opposes the sanctions and a new war with Iraq on moral, religious and humanitarian grounds, according to the foundation. However, polls that show most Americans support military action.

    Floyd Brown, executive director of the Young America’s Foundation, a conservative group founded under the Reagan Administration, said he believes most people in Santa Barbara would consider the trip to Iraq an “almost treasonous” act that “provides aid and comfort to the enemy.”

    He noted that Mr. Hussein is condemned by many human rights groups, and said the criticism of the President is particularly objectionable while America stands under a threat of further terrorist strikes.

    “It just shows how out of step they are with most Americans, and most of Santa Barbara,” he said.

    The trip technically violates U.S. policies — the federal government officially bars Americans from traveling to Iraq, prohibitions similar to restrictions against travel to Cuba.

    “We consider Iraq a supporter of state-sponsored terrorism,” said Greg Sullivan, spokesman for the U.S. State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs bureau.Still, Americans who enter the country are unlikely to face punishment, Mr. Sullivan noted, unless it is proven that they somehow provided “material benefit” to the Iraqi government.

    “Conditions throughout Iraq remain unsettled and dangerous,” according to the latest U.S. State Department travel warning, issued in July 2001. “Foreigners present in Iraq have in the past been used as ‘human shields’ by the (Hussein) regime during periods of confrontation with the international community.”

    Ms. Wells will make the trip, which starts Thursday, as part of a seven-member “Iraq Peace Team” sponsored by the Chicago-based Voices in the Wilderness, anonprofit organization focused on ending sanctions against the nation of more than 22 million people.

    The group, with members in several states, will fly to Amman, Jordan, and later enter Iraq on the ground.

    Its first destination? The capital city of Baghdad.

    Much of the itinerary was still being worked out Monday, Ms. Wells said.

    “We’re not there to do big events,” she said. “We’re there to be quiet observers.”

    On the side, Ms. Wells said she hopes to visit at least one site rarely viewed by Westerners. “I’m Catholic, and I’m really interested in seeing where St. Matthew is buried,” she said.

    Once her delegation returns, “I’m hoping to publish as many articles as I can about the trip,” she said.
    *News-Press City Editor Andy Rose and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

  • Act to Save the Children of Iraq

    August 6, 2002 (Hiroshima Day) marked the 12th year of the economic sanctions against Iraq. These economic sanctions were described to me during my visit to Iraq by an Iraqi teenager as being a “silent nuclear bomb that drops into every home and is slowly destroying not only the children but the whole Iraqi nation.” Well over a half million Iraqi children have died of malnutrition and preventable diseases (resulting from the after-effects of the Gulf War and continuing economic sanctions) and each day more children die unnecessarily.

    Now, as the Bush Administration is making extremely clear, Iraq is in serious danger of an all-out US assault in the coming months. This week when the Iraqi government offered weapons inspections, the American administration responded by saying it is not about weapons inspections. Rather than going into yet another war causing further untold suffering to Iraqi civilians (also effecting the Middle East and the entire human family, as we are now so interconnected), every diplomatic option must be tried to divert war. The age of wars has gone, such barbaric activity is not acceptable at any time. But even for those who believe in war, it should not be acceptable when diplomatic options are readily available as has been, and continues to be, the case with Iraq.

    The American Government has a responsibility to uphold its democratic constitution, abide by international law, and respect the democratic wishes of many American people and the vast majority of governments and peoples of the world, who are calling for a non-violent solution to this crisis. War on our Iraqi brothers and sisters would be a war on the spirit and dignity of the entire human family.

    We are currently in the UN Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World (2001-2010). This challenges us all to focus on the children and do all in our power to see they have clean water, food, medicine, and a safe environment and safe world. Children in Iraq do not have these things because of UN/USA/UK sanctions. The continuing death and suffering of Iraqi children is preventable. Let us therefore prevent it.

    Oppose US war against Iraq and work for diplomatic options, including the lifting of economic trade sanctions against the Iraqi people, who have been living and dying under these brutal sanctions and effects of war for too long.
    *Mairead Corrigan Maguire, a member of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Advisory Council, is a Nobel Peace Laureate from Northern Ireland and a founder of Peace People.

  • WARNING

    A misguided trap is being set by right wing conservatives. It threatens our national security interests and endangers our military personnel. A cleverly mislabeled “Servicemembers Protection Act,” was recently passed by the House and is now pending in the Senate where it was appended as an amendment linked to the Foreign Relations Act authorizing payment of arrears to the United Nations. In the guise of protecting our military, the amendment is clearly designed to abort the creation of an International Criminal Court (ICC) now being formed at the United Nations. The Act threatens to impose economic and military sanctions against any nation that dares to support the Court.

    Republican Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina leads the vigorous campaign that would repudiate the rule of law laid down at the Nuremberg trials after World War II – that aggression, genocide, crimes against humanity and major war crimes would never again go unpunished. Senator Helms and his supporters demand exemption and immunity for all U.S. personnel. Conservative attempts to abort the ICC defy the clear wishes of the vast majority of nations, including our leading European allies. We are seen as a bully that wants the rule of law for everyone else but not for ourselves. Without such a court, our military personnel will remain completely at the mercy of their captors, rather than under the protective shield of a fair tribunal created and supervised by the international community.

    The campaign to kill the court relies on unfounded allegations designed to frighten an uninformed public. Scholarly studies by outstanding legal experts agree that it would be in the U.S. national interest to support the International Criminal Court. See for example, the publication last year by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , the comprehensive speech by Senator Leahy of Vermont on Dec. 15, 2000; the recommendation of the American Bar Association in Feb. 2001, the conclusion sent to Congressman Henry Hyde on Feb. 13, 2001 by ten former Presidents of the American Society of International Law, endorsing “U.S. acceptance of the Treaty without change…”; the editorial in the American Journal of International Law by Monroe Leigh, former Counsel to both the State and Defense Departments, that the United states can most effectively protect its national-security interests, as well as the individual interests of U.S. nationals, by accepting the International Criminal Court, ” — better sooner than later.” ((95 AJIL 131, Jan. 2001). None of these persuasive opinions are ever mentioned by opponents of the ICC.

    Those who believe in the rule of law that applies equally to everyone had better let their voices be heard very soon if we are to move toward a more humane and peaceful world.