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Voices in the Wilderness: History, Activities, and Agendas Voices preached by its actions—more particularly, by conducting regular trips to Iraq to deliver medical and other supplies, all in violation of the U.N. sanctions regime as well as several U.S. laws and Presidential executive orders. The quantity of aid that Voices brought to Iraq was always a paltry, symbolic amount, but the real emphasis was to have group members "witness" the detrimental effects of sanctions for themselves, by visiting Iraqi hospitals, schools, and other areas—always in the presence of official "minders" of the Iraqi regime. These orchestrated trips provided the grist for group members, who returned home to educate their communities on the horrors of the U.S.-imposed sanctions. The propaganda fed to the members by Iraqi regime spokespersons was their primary source of information on sanctions, information which they then imparted to audiences all across the United States. The story of Voices is one of a simplistic utopian vision of peace being applied to an intractable humanitarian and political catastrophe. This may be a trait that cuts across the entire peace movement, but Voices had its own unique characteristics, which reflected its distinct pedigree within the larger peace movement. Voices was formed from the remnants of what has been dubbed the "Catholic Ultra-resistance," – those Catholic radicals centered on the Catholic Worker movement and the personalities of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and, especially, the radical priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan. Almost without exception, the founding members of Voices were drawn from the Catholic Worker movement, which has always seen U.S. government’s foreign—as well as many domestic—policies as violent, and therefore, morally unacceptable. The Catholic Worker movement developed a doctrine of nonviolent resistance, and its actions drew national attention during the Vietnam War. The Berrigan brothers became famous by stretching the meaning of nonviolence in their antiwar actions. In 1968, they "nonviolently" entered a draft board office in Catonsville, Maryland, and used homemade napalm to burn the files of recent inductees mobilized for the war. This action was seen as a way to end (or at least retard) the war-making process; because it was against the war, it was seen as inherently nonviolent. The Berrigans performed this and other acts that extended Gandhi’s definitions of nonviolence on the basis of their own belief that Catholic ethics summoned them to perform radical actions for peace. Such provocative actions were, for the Berrigans, not just protests against the war but also dramatic prayers for peace. This peculiar combination of high drama and liturgy manifested itself again in the Plowshares movement, beginning in 1980. The Berrigan brothers, as well as Catholic (and non-Catholic) radicals, would sneak onto military bases housing the U.S. nuclear arsenal and bang away on missile casings until they were arrested by military police. By such acts, they were symbolically "beating swords into plowshares." This movement is still active, and its members frequently end up in federal prison for performing such acts of "nonviolence." Voices belonged very much to this tradition with its emphasis on symbolic acts. The group's trips to Iraq with symbolic amounts of medical aid were to Voices what the burning of draft files was to the Berrigans and what the beating of nuclear weapons into "plowshares" is to the Plowshares movement. In fact, many individual Plowshares veterans supported Voices and occasionally joined it. Daniel Berrigan himself gave Voices a ringing endorsement: “An embargo has advantages over armed conflict; no Americans need die, no international furor over smart bombs incinerating people in shelters. It's simple and cheap, the noose tightens, and children and the aged and sick die in great numbers. This must be countered. ‘Voices in the Wilderness’ is doing just that—cutting the noose.” All of these interrelated social movements are characterized by "dramaturgy"—the combination of drama and liturgy, with ostensible prayers for peace and dramatic protest action in the face of significant jail terms. For some of these activists, dramaturgical protest has become nearly synonymous with other (traditional) Catholic sacraments, as exemplified by the title of Jesuit priest John Dear's popular volume, The Sacrament of Civil Disobedience. The Voices' specific dramaturgical protest involved travels to Iraq in direct violation of a U.S. government travel ban. The point of the ban was to prevent Americans from aiding the Iraqi economy, on the theory that the regime, once weakened, would either comply with U.N. disarmament requirements, or perhaps fall altogether. Voices always highlighted the fact that it was breaking the law. The penalties for Voices' Iraq delegations could have reached twelve years in federal prison and $1.25 million in fines and fees. Voices tempted the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to levy these penalties against them every time its members went to Iraq, perhaps hoping for the maximum penalties in order to bring the maximum amount of publicity to its cause. But the Treasury Department only imposed fines on a few members, and in amounts far less than the staggering maximums that Voices members boasted about when they made their post-trip presentations. For example, in December 1998, Voices was notified that it was to be fined a total of $163,000 by OFAC. Nothing further happened until Bert Sacks, a Seattle member, was actually served with a $10,000 fine by OFAC in May 2002. Sacks declined to pay the fine, seeing it as unethical to give money to the government he saw as responsible for the situation in Iraq. So with its own version of Berrigan-esque "dramaturgy," Voices fancied itself as heir to the mantle of the Catholic ultra-resistance, the Berrigans, and the Plowshares movement. There was just one problem: its members refused the punishments that they defied the government to impose on them. The Berrigans were sentenced to significant jail terms and served years in prison for their protest activities. Voices always refused the (few) fines levied on it and escaped serious consequences. Because of this, and despite tracing its heritage to the radical priests, Voices never achieved even a fraction of the Berrigans' dramatic impact. The government's decision to not pursue Voices (as it did the Berrigans) lessened the group's impact and probably reflects the fact that Voices never represented a serious threat to the sanctions regime or the government's policy of containing Saddam Hussein. The Cause
When the issue of Iraq sanctions first crossed the American public’s radar screens sometime around 1995, the default position in the peace movement rapidly came into focus: sanctions were imposed by the U.N. at the behest of the United States in order to secure U.S. control over Iraq's oil. The United States did not care about the "fact" that the sanctions apparently killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis by withholding necessary foodstuffs and medical supplies. The peace movement was in search of new issues in the post-Cold War environment, and this one seemed serviceable. Then-U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Madeleine Albright's unfortunate and oft-quoted interview on 60 Minutes only helped peace activists frame the sanctions issue in a very simplistic fashion. Albright was asked this question: "We have heard that a half million children have died (as a result of sanctions against Iraq). I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" Albright did not contest the claim, but simply answered: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it." What did Voices members know about Iraq? Hardly anything. Stephen Zunes, a "progressive" activist academic, once acknowledged that "peace activists largely share with most Americans a profound ignorance of the Middle East, Islam, and the Arab world." But Voices members saw themselves as people of action, not reflection. Thus, rather than learn the intricacies of Iraqi history and politics and plumb the broader political and economic issues, they opted to march, fast, and demonstrate against Iraqi sanctions. Voices' arguments about sanctions were straightforward. Voices held that sanctions were violence that the U.S. government committed against Iraq, through the exercise of raw power. The Iraqi regime was entirely helpless and passive and had no ability to respond to the economic pressure the U.N. had put on Iraq since 1990. Voices was oblivious to deliberate Iraqi obfuscation on disarmament and to Saddam's domestic policies, designed to maintain his iron grip over the Iraqi people for as long as possible. It was Voices’ view that the regime had little or no ability to control or direct Iraq's destiny. The group saw the U.S.-sponsored sanctions as the primary cause of violence in Iraq and so overlooked (or denied) Saddam's decades-long legacy of severe repression. Moreover, Voices was quite willing to consider the Baath regime as a reliable source of value-free information on Iraq. Group members had neither the training nor the inclination to dissect Baathist propaganda, and Voices members regularly parroted this propaganda in their public presentations as if it were fact, without much editing or critical reflection. Little effort was expended in learning more about general trends and issues in Iraqi history, culture, and politics. As a result, their presentations were rife with factual errors and misstatements. For example, the background reading for delegation members bound for Iraq consisted of a page-and-a-half of text covering the several dozen centuries of Iraqi history between Nebuchadnezzar and Saddam Hussein. Works on contemporary Iraqi history and politics that did not take the injustice of Desert Storm as their point of departure were not only ignored, but were very often denounced as pro-American or even pro-Israeli propaganda, created to serve the "violent" U.S. (or Israeli) policies toward Iraq. For example, some members of Voices dismissed the important works of Kanan Makiya, the most prominent Iraqi dissident intellectual in the United States, as "pro-Israeli." Because of their collective ignorance of Iraqi history and politics, Voices members were largely unaware of the service they rendered to the regime. Not only did Voices members meet senior Iraqi officials (including Tariq Aziz), but the group was publicly thanked for serving as an official channel of information from the Iraqi regime to the American people by Saddam Hussein himself. They had no interest in Iraqi dissidents, exiles, and opposition groups, who had documented Saddam's past aggression, genocide, and flaunting of U.N. Security Council (UNSC) resolutions. Voices simply parroted Baathist propaganda, and the regime learned to use them (and other peace movement groups) for just that purpose. For example, not only did they demand the complete unconditional lifting of sanctions, but they also bought into the regime's notion that weapons inspections were a pretext for U.S. domination of Iraq. They even imported the regime's fantasy that the U.N. weapons inspectors were American and/or Israeli spies. Their position was that U.S. concern over weapons of mass destruction was simply a pretext for continuing the sanctions, so that American oil companies could secure control over Iraq's nationalized oil resources. They could not imagine that the Iraqi regime might use, or even exacerbate, the sanctions crisis for its own political ends. For example, they simply ignored Iraq's own periodic suspensions of oil exports. There were five instances of oil export suspension beginning in 1998, by which the Iraqi regime forfeited approximately $3.4 billion. These suspensions seriously diminished Iraq's ability to generate the revenue needed to provide medical aid supplies and war reparations and greatly retarded humanitarian recovery efforts. It was a case of the regime itself exacerbating the suffering of the Iraqi people. But Voices members—like the Iraqi regime—were always antagonistic towards the Oil-for-Food program (known sometimes as UNSC Resolution 986). One Voices founder, Bob Bossie, in a group meeting to evaluate the program, determined: "The biggest problem [Voices] face[s], as I see it, is Resolution 986."[13] The reason was explained by founding member Chuck Quilty: "The problem [Voices] saw right away was that 986 would be used by the United States to say that humanitarian problems in Iraq were taken care of and allay any of those who might be concerned that sanctions were killing innocent people." They abhorred the program because it improved the lot of ordinary Iraqis, and therefore, diminished U.S. culpability. As former Voices member Charles M. Brown acknowledges, “To be perfectly frank, we were less concerned with the suffering of the Iraqi people than we were in maintaining our moral challenge to U.S. foreign policy. We did not agitate for an end to sanctions for purely humanitarian reasons; it was more important to us to maintain our moral challenge to ‘violent’ U.S. foreign policy, regardless of what happened in Iraq. For example, had we been truly interested in alleviating the suffering in Iraq, we might have considered pushing for an expanded Oil-for-Food program. Nothing could have interested us less. Indeed, we even regarded the paltry amounts of aid that we did bring to Iraq as a logistical hassle. When it suited us, we portrayed ourselves as a humanitarian nongovernmental organization and at other times as a political group lobbying for a policy change. In our attempt to have it both ways, we failed in both of these missions. We were so preoccupied with our own agenda that we didn't notice or care that the regime made use of us. When critics asked us whether the group was being exploited by the Iraqi regime, we obfuscated, and in so doing put Saddam and his minions on the same level as the U.S. government.” Silence in the Wilderness
What led Voices to maintain so studied a silence over Iraq's horrendous human rights record? Travel to Iraq was central to the method of Voices, and its members were wholly dependent upon the regime's good graces to gain necessary travel permits and visas to enter and travel throughout the country. In fact, until about 2000, there was a policy within the group barring them from publicly criticizing the violence of the Iraqi regime when speaking in the name of Voices. In order to advocate for the Iraqi people, Voices had to remain silent on such significant issues as the legacy of the genocidal Anfal campaign against the Kurds, the regime's crushing of the 1991 intifada, the wide-ranging and systematic abuse of human rights, and especially, Iraq's refusal to comply with the disarmament requirements of UNSC resolutions 687 and 1441. If Voices members were seen by the Iraqi regime as hostile to its interests, then there would be no reason for it to allow them access to Iraq. And without direct access to Iraq, they would lose our special credibility to criticize sanctions. In other words, they could continue their chosen form of activism only if they collaborated with the Iraqi regime. Today, Voices continues to oppose U.S. foreign policy in Iraq, condemning the war as an aggressive, counter-productive assault on innocent civilians. Toward this end, the group has initiated a War-Tax Resistance campaign, which Voices describes in this manner: “Monstrous amounts of dollars which could reinvigorate our ailing health, housing, and school systems are instead diverted to increase the profits of defense corporations and simultaneously destroy life. As federal support for education programs are slashed and more and more young people are told by military recruiters that the best way they can get a college education is to enlist, the spirit of our society takes a beating. Tax resistance is the most direct way US citizens can avoid being complicit in this war. If all of us who have written our Congresspersons or taken to the streets also refuse to financially back the war, the decision-makers in Washington have a much harder time ignoring our resistance. We ask you to consider war tax resistance this tax year, and in the years to come. The best way to stop the war machine is to refuse to fund it.”
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