Voices in the Wilderness (VW) was founded in 1996 to protest the America-led, U.N. sanctions against Iraq. Its name -- an allusion to the biblical prophet Isaiah, who cried out for justice in a wilderness of injustice (Isaiah, 40:3) -- embodied the group's view of Iraqi sanctions as acts of injustice perpetrated by the United States government upon the people of Iraq. VW members saw themselves as modern-day Isaiahs, calling America to its conscience.

VW conducted 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 more symbolic than substantive; 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. After being schooled by spokesmen of Saddam's regime about the deadly toll that sanctions were taking on Iraq's population, VW volunteers returned home to convey these sentiments to audiences all across the United States.

Almost without exception, the founding members of VW were drawn from what has been dubbed the "Catholic Ultra-resistance" -- those Catholic radicals sympathetic to the Catholic Worker movement's doctrine of nonviolent resistance and the personalities of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and, especially, the radical priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan. 

VW always highlighted the fact that it was breaking the law by sponsoring trips to Iraq. The penalties for its Iraq delegations could have reached twelve years in federal prison and $1.25 million in fines and fees. VW tempted the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to levy these penalties against its members every time they went to Iraq, knowing that harsh punishments would bring the maximum amount of publicity to its cause. But the Treasury Department only imposed minor fines on a few members. VW members always refused to pay and, in the end, escaped serious consequences. 

VW members met senior Iraqi officials (including Tariq Aziz), and 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. Not only did VW demand the complete unconditional lifting of sanctions, but it also accepted the regime's notion that weapons inspections were a pretext for U.S. domination of Iraq and its oil reserves. 

VW members—like the Iraqi regime—were antagonistic toward the Oil-for-Food program (known sometimes as UNSC Resolution 986). As VW co-founder Bob Bossie said during the era of sanctions, "The biggest problem [VW] face[s], as I see it, is Resolution 986." VW founding member Chuck Quilty elaborated: "The problem [VW] 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 [to] allay any of those who might be concerned that sanctions were killing innocent people." 

Former VW member Charles M. Brown, who has since come to view the organization as irresponsible and duplicitous, later acknowledged: "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. … 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."

Because travel to Iraq was central to VW's activities, the organization was wholly dependent upon the regime's good graces to gain necessary travel permits and visas to enter and travel throughout the country. Thus VW had to remain silent on such significant issues as Iraq's human rights abuses, genocide, and especially its refusal to comply with the disarmament requirements of UNSC resolutions 687 and 1441. Until about 2000, there was a policy within the group explicitly barring its members from publicly criticizing the Iraqi regime.

Today VW 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 to redirect the "[m]onstrous amounts of dollars" spent on the U.S. military to projects "which could reinvigorate our ailing health, housing, and school systems." "The best way to stop the war machine is to refuse to fund it," says VW.

VW is a member organization of the United for Peace and Justice anti-war coalition, which is led by Leslie Cagan, a longtime committed socialist who aligns her politics with those of Fidel Castro's Communist Cuba.