Submitted by the author.

“Will you come back to Baghdad?” Ahmed asked me. “No, probably not. But I won’t forget you,” I told him. “I hope you find a good wife and have many beautiful children.” He smiled broadly, shook my hand and embraced me in the Iraqi manner, kissing the left, then the right cheek. That was last year. I had no intention of returning. It is hard on the body as well as the spirit. Then I changed my mind.

I made friends in Baghdad. I thought of them every day. There is an 8 by 10 photo of Hassan, the shoeshine boy on my bureau, the little scamp. How is Mister Cameron, Mister Luay, the hotel staff, the tailor, Mrs. Amahl and her children? And Ahmed, my shoeshine boy? He waited for me every day at his stand before a yellow brick wall outside the Al Fanar Hotel. He threw his arms up ever time he saw me, knowing that I would want another shine and that I would overpay.

Then came the bombing, the invasion, the Occupation, the rampages, the looting. Criminals flushed out of their jails, mental patients out of their asylums, orphans out of their orphanages. Then mounting numbers of American soldiers dead and many times that many maimed and wounded, attacked by Iraqis who see themselves as freedom fighters, twelve, then thirty and more times a day. Iraqi civilian dead are estimated at 10,000. All this mayhem because of us. Not because of the American people but because of our government. But we are a democracy, aren’t we? Then the people are responsible. I am one of them. I have to tell the others.

I wanted to visit religious leaders, Christian and Muslim, to assure the Muslims of our deep respect for them. I wanted to tell them of the “New Evangelization” that incorporates work for justice and peace in the proclamation and that respects the faith of others, that we, all the people of the Abrahamic, Biblical faith must stand together in solidarity against the rising tide of secularism, materialism and the degraded morality they bring in their wake.

I wanted to visit labor organizers. The conquest of Iraq is part of a larger world-wide tide driven by neo-conservative ideologues to lay bare the great masses of the world’s people to exploitation by the already super-rich. They call it privatization.

This war is for oil, to control the oil that will fuel China’s modernization and Europe’s economy, so that we (not me, and probably not you) may have our way with them.

I want to help my fellow citizens win our country back and to bring it into conformity with the law of nations and the United Nations Charter.

I felt I had to go back. What I found left me in near total despair. The largest mass protest rallies in the world’s history, public opinion manifested across the globe against the invasion, the most urgent pleading of Pope John Paul II and much of the world’s religious leadership were of no avail. Iraq is in agony. Tony Blair should have known better but he deceived himself. His army chiefs considered refusal to follow his orders for fear that an attack on Iraq might be judged illegal by an international court of law and that they might be tried as war criminals. They waited upon the advice of U.K. Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, who, after first judging the war illegal, then much hesitation and persuasion, went along with Number 10 Downing Street.

I set out from New York to Amman, Jordan, on January 27, for the overland drive to Baghdad. Rick McDowell of the AFSC met me in Amman. He insisted that I live anywhere but where I had last year, the Al Fanar and the Andalus, hotels that Voices in the Wilderness and Christian Peace Teams have used. But they are in the Green Zone now, a sizable area of central Baghdad set aside for the Occupation authority, and therefore unsafe, a target. Concrete barriers and razor wire run for blocks around the Zone. Everyone entering is frisked by armed guards. The Palestine and the Sheraton, luxury hotels, are in the Green Zone also. It is simply too dangerous to speak to soldiers even casually on the street. There may be people watching. So I took a room at the Al Dar, a small hotel in the Kerrada district a few blocks east.

But I had to visit Mister Cameron at the Andalus and Mister Luay at the Al Fanar. Mister Cameron recognized me instantly and greeted me. “How are you my dear Mister Thomas? Do sit down, please. Will you have coffee or tea?” His rooms are going for $70 and his guests are largely Iranian Shiite pilgrims. But at the Fanar around the corner business is off. Mister Luay offered me a room with two meals (they have a fine kitchen) for $25 a day.

I asked about the shoeshine boys. Little Hassan’s mother had been picked up by the police and was in jail, like his dad. When Saddam let everybody out, his mother and father took Hassan up to Mosul with them. They are Kurds. Ahmed has not been seen for months. Broken brick and shards of tile lay in a pile against the yellow brick wall where he had been. I’ll take a photo. No! This is the Green Zone, No photos anywhere! You face arrest and confiscation of your camera.

Cynthia Banas told me she had seen Little Hassan in the first days of the Occupation, that he wasn’t shining shoes anymore, that he was “running errands” for the soldiers. He had a knapsack on his back. Cynthia is everybody’s grandma. It wasn’t out of character for her to lift the flap on Hassan’s knapsack and look in to see what he was running. “Whisky and fifty dollar bills,” she told me. I hope that’s all.

A memory flashed into my head, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk the very first day he spent in the U.S., thirty-eight years ago. We were sitting together in Al Hassler’s office at the FOR in Nyack, New York. “The longer you Americans stay in Viet Nam the worse the end result will be, whichever side wins or whatever compromise they negotiate.” Then he spoke of the damage the U.S. was doing to Vietnamese culture. “You are making prostitutes of our daughters and drug runners and procurers of our sons.” I shuddered to remember. I hope it’s just booze and hashish that Hassan is running. He is ten years old!

Business is off at the Palestine and the Sheraton too. The major news media and wire services had used these hotels. I had an introduction to a few BBC journalists who were supposedly staying at the Sheraton. So, frisked, I walked through two check-points, past the razor wire and around the concrete blockades to the hotel entrance and to the desk to find a woman shrieking at the desk clerk in English. She is a journalist from Madrid just back from six weeks “embedded” with the U.S. troops in Kirkuk. There are no courtesy rooms any more, she finds. All the journalists have left, moved to safer if more modest accommodations.

Mister Cameron says, “Things are better now. Saddam is gone, we can talk.” He notes that business is picking up, shops are re-opening. There is plenty of vehicular traffic. That’s an understatement. The first thing one notices on approaching Baghdad is the traffic. My driver’s frustration grew to the breaking point as he tried one avenue after another into the city, only to meet gridlock, turn back and try another, then another route. There are no long lines at the gasoline pumps any more. A gallon is still twelve cents. Gasoline is bought at $2.82, trucked in from Kuwait, subsidized through the Iraqi Treasury. The U.S. military buys at the same price, thanks to the U.S. Treasury. The difference goes to the “middle-man,” in this case Halliburton. It’s a wise move to keep Iraqi men driving. They burn off as much testosterone as petrol. It is unimaginable. Cars seemingly no more than two inches one from another at any point careen through the streets, change lanes, hang U-turns, drive three ways on a one-way street with no traffic controls of any kind, no signs, no lights, no cops. And the air! Heavy with exhaust fumes last year, now there is another flavor note, acrid, as of burning rubber.

Mister Cameron, a Kurd, wants to put the best face on things. The morning after the attacks on the two political parties in Erbil, in the Kurdish autonomous region in the north, which killed over one hundred and wiped out the political leadership, I visited him again. He was visibly shaken. He fears that some relatives and friends are among the dead. He knows that vacuums will be filled, in this case by younger, less patient and more ambitious and angry young
men. Kurdish demands for independence cause tremors in Ankara and in Teheran. Regional destabilization seems the only possible goal for these attacks.

I walk past many, many more bombed and burned out buildings than last year. Turn right out of the Al Dar, walk a few yards to the corner and turn left for one block past flattened ruins. A man lives here in the rubble. He is spectral, shades of brown, a brown blanket over his brown head, brown face and body. He sits upright or walks with eerie dignity, barefoot, but he never approaches. How, where does he eat? Turn right again for half a block to Abu Nawas along the Tigris, then left again for two blocks to the Christian Peacemaker Team, past a burned and blasted out storefront. The windows are gone but there is a grating and tattered blankets strung along it for privacy for the family, with many small children, squatting there. These streets are dark at night and unfrequented, unsafe to walk after sunset.

On Kerrada Street a very thin elderly man approaches. He puts fingers to open mouth and sounds a weak plea. His eyes are desperate. There is the aura of death about him. I am not in a position to give him anything at this moment, but look for him later that day and every day thereafter. I can not find him. Has he collapsed? Mind’s eye still sees him.

There are craters in sidewalks and piles of rubble and piles of garbage, one large heap near my hotel. I pass it at least four times a day. It must be refuse from a nearby restaurant because there are many outer leaves of romaine lettuce on it, such as a salad chef discards. The pile grows higher, then diminishes. There is no garbage collection. How does it diminish? At dusk a man scoops garbage with his hands into a black plastic bag held open by a young boy, father and son no doubt, scavenging the family supper.

No one admitted any nostalgia for Saddam Hussein, although Mrs. Amahl said, “With Saddam the streets were safe.” Those who spoke of improvements were few and unsophisticated. When I asked Ghazwan Al-Mukhtar, a U.C.L.A. educated successful entrepreneur, he said, “Improvement? Relative to what? Relative to the first days of the Occupation, yes. But it’s two hundred thousand times worse of you compare it to before the Iran war of 1981, of the war of 1991, or before the twelve years of sanctions! Iraq is a rich country!” He looks about him as he drives. “Thank you, America! Now we have freedom! Look at the freedom we have, freedom to park your car in the middle of the road.” (There was a line of cars parked, yes, in the middle of a major thoroughfare.) It was morning. Ghazwan picked me up at my hotel and drove to his home to take his son Ali, an eighteen year old student to his school. It is “Boston on the Tigris,” the secondary school established by the New England Jesuits, now long gone. Ali’s father is known to be a man of substance. Therefore he can not afford to send his son to school and back by taxi, for fear of kidnapping. He drives the boy to and from.

“Here! Look at the pavement on this road.” Ghazwan points to the different texture of a swath of road-top near his home and explains that there is a sewer pipe recently laid under there. He drives fifty yards or so and points to an open ditch of raw sewage and a main
sewer line not far away. The sanitation department was supposed to connect them. But it never got done. And it’s still not done. “Thank you for the e-coli in my tap water!” he fairly shouts, and names three other pathogenic agents. Mind you, this is where the rich people live!

Ghazwan points to an Internet Cafe. It is around the corner from a police station. “I bought and furnished that place, and I have never been able to open it.” No one is fool enough to sit at a computer a few yards from a police station, not now! Police stations are among the most dangerous places in Baghdad. There is an auto repair shop right next to the police station. The owner has sunk his entire equity into this shop, but he has no customers. The police forbid parking anywhere nearby for fear of car bombs.

“They call us barbarians and camel drivers,” Ghazwan goes on, still driving. “Here, let me show you the Indian cemetery.” It borders a hospital complex. The Indian military dead buried here were fighting on behalf of the British Empire in World War I, enemy dead. And yet, Ghazwan points out, their graves are respected, invaders though they were. The hospital wanted to expand, but it had to expand around, not over the cemetery. So it is with the British cemetery, and the Turkish. “And yet you Americans come and desecrate the tomb of Michel Aflaq, a founder of the Baath Party, a key figure in Arab nationalism. “Barbaric!” he says. “You may not agree with his philosophy, but why eradicate the history of the Iraqi people? That is unacceptable!”

Security is the number one issue for everyone of every class and persuasion. Before the “regime change,” there were forty-three security officers for every thousand citizens. Now there are three. Improvement? Four is an improvement over three, but it is insignificant.

Infrastructure is the next issue on people’s minds. “Why is it,” one man asked, “that after the 1991 bombardment, we could make major repairs in four months, and with the U.S. eleven months have gone by and we still wait for telephone service, water treatment, steady electricity?” Huge sums have been made available for infrastructure repair, 18.4 billion dollars, but to the present authorities that means pipelines, refineries and the industry that attracted the U.S. to this area in the first place.

When the infrastructure is re-established, employment is bound to pick up. Unemployment is now at 60 to 65 percent. Unemployed former soldiers and police are a seething mass of resentment. A “Union of the Unemployed” calls for unemployment compensation. They hold demonstrations of one hundred or so. But there are millions of unemployed.

The Iraqi Communist Party is part of the Interim Governing Council, and as such receives a subsidy from the IGC. They have confiscated two large buildings, just walked in
and took them over. Several leading Communists met with me at two different centers for
extended conversation. They are all men, all wear ties and suits. They write of the insurgency always with quotation marks around the word. It is no insurgency, they insist. It has no real popular backing. They want the Occupation out “as soon as possible.”

The labor unions had become organs of the state under Saddam, which reclassified every worker in a nationalized industry a civil servant with no right to strike. Those unions’ legitimacy has been damaged in the eyes of workers. More than that, the Coalition Governing Authority has affirmed Saddam’s anti-labor laws, raided union headquarters and arrested leaders. The labor movement has to be re-built from the ground up. The CP claims that it has organizing committees in several industries, but there is no way to judge their effectiveness.

The Communist Workers Party is also active, but not a part of the Governing Council. They are more casual in dress and manner, and conversation is lively. “This is no pre-revolutionary situation,” a leader tells me. “There is no solidarity, no sense of friendship. The people are divided and fearful. They don’t trust each other.” This is clearly seen on the street where tempers flare and an automatic pistol is sold from a card table on the sidewalk. Gunfire is heard day and night. He speaks with contempt of the attacks, more and more directed at Iraqis deemed to be “collaborators,” that is, men lined up at recruitment stations for police and the new army, husbands and fathers most of them, trying their best to make a living for their families, now left widows and orphans. This is no way to build a working class movement, he insists, to instill fear and hatred one against another. The CWP also claims to have organizing committees in several industries.

The International Labor Organization, the AFL-CIO, the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) all have some presence here. Paul Bremer, director of the Occupation authority, has announced that 15 million dollars will be made available to help owner and worker groups to organize. One essential factor is missing, direct access to courts for the enforcement of the right to organize. We don’t have that in the U.S., and that is why less than 13 percent of our labor force is organized, less than 7 percent in the private sector.

The position of women is precarious. The IGC came close, by one vote, to passing a new code that would nullify the 1957 Family Law that secured the right of women to inherit property, to initiate divorce, to claim rights in regard to children after divorce and to forbid their husbands from polygamy if they so wish. Few women are in positions of authority and far fewer women are seen on the streets. One afternoon I walked for three miles on a major thoroughfare, Al Sadoon Street, at my rate of speed about an hour and a half. I saw thousands of men and boys and seventeen women and girls. Lack of police protection means a multiple increase in rape and kidnapping.

Human rights violations by U.S. military are widespread, severe and unreported by mainstream media. I tagged along with the Christian Peacemaker Team to a small village in the countryside to interview a family, with an interpreter. The head of the farming family is a white haired, white bearded old man, his face dried and creased by the sun. We sit on the floor, on rugs and cushions. The house is brick, fairly substantial, with high ceilings, no wall decorations. Children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews run in and out. The lady of the house serves soft drinks. The men smoke.

There had been an attack on a U.S. military convoy nearby, no fatalities, some injuries. The following Friday, helicopters buzzed the local mosque to assemble the townspeople. The military swooped in and entered houses at random, took what cash they could find and arrested the men, dragged them by their collars, their hands cuffed behind their backs, to the scene of the attack, then forced them to kneel and demanded to know who was responsible. Black hemp sacks were placed over the men’s heads. They were kicked and beaten. Grandfather asked for water. A soldier beat him over the head with a water jug. He fell. A soldier then kicked him, lifted him up and threw him down again. The other men were told to face a wall. Their heads were bashed into the wall. Then they were forced to lie on their stomachs, their hands still cuffed behind their backs the next twelve hours. Grandfather and his son claimed this went on for four days. Marks of the plastic handcuffs were still visible on their wrists.

The thirty year old son told how he was interrogated on the third day of his detention. He was told to face a wall. His hood was removed. He was told to look neither to the left or the right, neither up or down or at the translator. He claimed the U.S. soldiers beat him on the shoulders, neck and head with their hands and fists, that he fell, that he was dragged to his feet by his neck and placed with his back to the wall this time. To show us what happened next, he took his ten year old boy and placed him back to the wall, separated his legs and then raised his foot as if to kick! He said that he was told that if he continued to refuse to cooperate, the soldiers would then go to his home, take all the women, strip them naked and put their photographs on the Internet. Absurd, but what are these pious Shiites to think?

On the fourth day, the men were taken to another installation where they were fed and processed for release. An Arabic speaking U.S. soldier told them they were lucky that they were not in a group that had been subjected to electric shock torture. The men had no words for this, which lent credibility to their story, no knowledge of stun guns or electric cattle prods. On
release they were not given their ID cards, personal effects or 400,000 dinars, and no receipts.

Grandfather asks our ages. I tell him 70. I ask his. He is 52. I could be his father yet he looks much older than I. He seems an honest and honorable man. “Allah does not want us to lie. I do not lie.”

At some point during the time of these men’s detention, all the other men of the village were assembled and told to look at the ground, not at the soldiers. Men whose eyes strayed were forced to kneel. Soldiers pressed their heads downward and took photographs of then humiliated. “We come as friends,” a commander said. “Make us enemies and then see what we will do.” That called to mind the words of Col. Nathan Sassaman, battalion commander of the village of Abu Hishma, about fifty miles north of Baghdad: “With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them.”

There are so many reports easily available on the Internet from Amnesty International, Christian Peacemaker Teams and from Occupation Watch of egregious human rights violations, eye-witness accounts of shootings, wild gunfire into crowds, abandoning Iraqi wounded civilians to die, prevention of aid to the wounded, failure even to record civilian deaths estimated to be up to ten thousand, mass arrests with no recourse to legal counsel and no specific charges, the disappearance of detainees, and theft by U.S. military, that I refer the reader to those sources and report only what I myself have seen and heard.

The number of U.S. military dead is over five hundred and fifty with many times that number maimed and wounded. The suicide rate in the military has tripled. The dead are flown into Dover Air Force Base in Delaware under cover of night with no media coverage allowed. The President has yet to attend a funeral. Many in the military, and their families, do not accept the rationale for this war. They are good men and women, for the most part, worthy of respect and sympathy. But it is also true that the military always and everywhere has served as a place to siphon off people whose sociopathic tendencies can be put to approved use only in an agency whose distinguishing purpose is to break things and kill people.

In three weeks time, walking the streets at least two hours day, I noticed the public mood change perceptibly. Last year I walked alone wherever I wanted, day or night, and never met a hostile glance. This year, as the days passed, people’s faces reflected deepening suspicion, fear and hostility. And from more and more sources, there is talk of civil war. Robert Fisk, veteran Middle East reporter and respected analyst, says that Iraq is falling apart.

The Christian clergy have all they can do to answer appeals from parishioners, among them parents of children kidnapped and held for ransom as long as two months. There have been nasty incidents, attacks on Christian houses of worship, but there is no pattern of souring of relations with Muslims yet. The papal nuncio, Archbishop Fernando Filoni, granted me an interview, as did the Latin Patriarch, Archbishop Jean Sleiman. Father Raab Washan
invited me to visit him and Bishop Ishlamoun Warduni, auxiliary to the Chaldean
Patriarch, at their rectory. They agreed that dialogue is shallow. The biggest fear, voiced strongly by Bishop Warduni, is that a flood of Christian evangelicals from the U.S. will antagonize the Muslim leadership and provoke the Muslim faithful to turn against all Christians. These sheep-raiders go after Christians as well as Muslims, lupi rapaci, Bishop Warduni called them in Italian, “rapacious wolves.” They tell Catholics and Chaldean Orthodox that their baptism is of no avail, that they must be baptized again, that they must forswear their allegiance to their ancient churches founded by Saint Thomas the Apostle and come over to them to have access to the Bible and to eternal salvation. They say the Muslims are hell-bound for damnation, that Islam is a false religion and Mohammed’s God is an idol. Their hyper-individualistic social and political attitudes as well as their mind-numbing emotionalism fit in well with neo-conservative aspirations for a new Iraq as a model for the Middle East.

In a Muslim complex in Kerbala, I met with four leading Shiite imams at their interfaith dialogue center. The Grand Ayatollah sent his regrets, but he was on pilgrimage. We sat on carpets and talked for three hours, with an interpreter. The sheiks were moderate, measured, calm and deeply thoughtful. I sensed the kind of peace of soul that is the fruit of the Holy Spirit in them. The first thing they wanted to do was to detect any sign of condescension on my part as a Westerner, the assumption of superiority, a “We have come to help you” attitude.

“What do you think of Iraq, of the people?” the lead sheik asked me. I told him that I found the Iraqi people to be intelligent, educated and industrious, an ancient people and honorable, and that they have a strong and beautiful religious culture. That having been said, we could talk.

I spoke of the de-Christianization of much of Europe and the U.S. intelligentsia, how Western cultures are coarsening, weakening, rotting from within and that the same forces of secularism (not separation of church and state, but separation of religious tradition and values from public discourse and policy) and materialism, both philosophical and vulgar, are sure to attack their societies as well, and that Christians and Muslims ought to stand shoulder to shoulder against these corroding influences, that we have enemies not in each other, but common enemies. Dialogue should lead to cooperation.

Only one imam showed any sign of belligerence. He brought up the subject of Israel. Israel is a factor in any political analysis of the Middle East. I stressed the importance of avoiding even an appearance of anti-Semitism, how anti-Semitism hurts us all. At the end, the lead sheik asked if I would take an invitation to the Vatican to send a delegation to Kerbala. I told them that I would be very happy to do that and that I had an appointment scheduled at the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. They spelled out their names carefully for me to carry to Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald in Rome, then ordered lunch for us all, my driver and interpreter as well. A few days later I saw the place where we had met on BBC-TV, a fireball, a tremendous explosion caught on film, an attack on a religious procession. At the same time, a bomb went off at the major Shiite mosque in Baghdad. More than two hundred died, many of them women and children at prayer. Unspeakable! Anger is aimed at the Occupation forces for failing to provide security. Is this a cynical attempt to drive the Shiites into alliance with the Sunni insurgency? Chaos on the one hand, civil war on the other.

During my three weeks in Iraq, there were more killings than at any other time since the invasion. In the boldest move, seventy heavily armed men raided the police headquarters, a recruiting post and the mayor’s office in Fallujah, killed twenty-seven people, freed the prisoners from the local jail and then disappeared, having lost three fighters. That calls for coordination and a degree of local support. At each attack, no matter who is immediately responsible, the people blame the Americans. They can destroy Saddam Hussein, they can reach Mars and walk on the moon, but they can not protect our streets and mosques. They are here for another purpose!

I have tried to pace myself, eat breakfast and one other substantial meal a day, set out on two major objectives, get back to the hotel by nightfall and into bed by 9 p.m. But I am more tired than I know, and the psychological strain is taking a toll, even if I am unaware of it.

Cathy Breen e-mailed me from New York to ask if I have enough cash to front a sum for a family in particular need. I have the cash. I am to give it to Haythem Al-Jaborie, who will take it to the family. Haythem came to the Al Dar, I handed him the money, and to make small talk, I showed him photographs from home, my family, Peter Maurin Farm, and there is a photo too of Little Hassan with Ahmed and Saef. Haythem recognized Saef and said he is working only a few blocks from here. “Would you like to see him?”

We walked six or seven blocks on Kerrada Street, turned left and entered a small clothing store and there he is. “Father Tom!” he exclaims. I ask Saef if he has any word of Ahmed. “I was going to see him tonight!” He asks to be let out of work early. We hail a cab and set out for Sadr City, formerly known as Saddam City, a very poor section of one million Shiites laid our in a grid north of the center city. In the Saddam era, foreigners were not allowed to see
this section. There are horses, donkeys, sheep, goats and chickens in the streets, pushcarts and barefoot children. Saef leads me through an alleyway to a cement wall and a green metal door. He knocks. A small child opens. We enter a dirt courtyard and then a modest house. There he is, Ahmed, looking astonished, his mother and father, three brothers and his younger sister, the older one is away. They bring out a chair for me and sit around on the floor.

“Ahmed is a man now,” his mother says. Yes, he is, at age fourteen.

“Do you remember what I told you before I left last year, Ahmed, what to do when the bombs start falling? To go home to your family and stay there.” His father understands. His mother too. They are pleased. Ahmed’s father has forbidden his son to work in the central city because of the danger. He himself is unemployed.

After twenty minutes, it is time to go. Ahmed walks to the courtyard with me. I slip him some money to buy a pushcart. “Do you remember what else I told you last year? About your relationships? First to Allah.” “Yes, he says emphatically, “Allah Wahed!” The One God is first. “Then, number two, your family, do you remember?” “Yes,” he says. “And third?” He bursts into a grin. “You!” he says, just as I was saying “Me!” We both laugh. “What I mean is your friends, your real friends.... I will pray for you every day. We will probably never meet again. I am old. But I will pray for you even when I am dead, so that on the Last Day, when Jesus comes with the Imam, they will bring us all back together again.” Ahmed’s face is transparent. He takes his prayer beads out of his pocket and presses them into my hand.

A day’s rest in Amman was not enough to get over the stress of getting there, nineteen hours in an antique bus. A piece of luggage fell from a rack onto the driver’s head when he was at full speed. Someone shoved it back. It fell on his head again. Is this a Three Stooges movie? I say the Jesus prayer on Ahmed’s beads, several laps.

On to Rome. Just settled in, I fell ill with severe bronchitis and a high fever. I had to cancel a rally in Turin and a meeting in another northern town. Terrible to be in Rome and have no motivation to walk this wonderful city. I was able to see Archbishop Renato Martino at the Council for Justice and Peace and give him a written report. “Now they know the Pope was right!” he says. Michael Novak had organized a teaching session for one hundred and fifty Vatican theologians and curialists to show them how to interpret just war theory so as to reach the conclusions the White House requires. The result was the opposite of that intended, as far as I could tell. I conveyed to Archbishop Fitzgerald at Interreligious Dialogue the invitation to Kerbala, which, the Archbishop told me, just might lead to something. Fr. Robert Sarno, at the Congregation for the Cause of Saints, greeted me to talk about Dorothy Day’s cause. But for the most part, it was ten days on my back, coughing and dosing myself with over the counter remedies and Vitamin C.

Carmen Trotta picked me up at JFK on March 3, still sick, and drove me straight home to Marlboro, where a week later, I began to revive and to try to write this account. It occurred to me only this morning that there is a psychosomatic element to an illness like this: the overwhelming knowledge that the Administration has made a mess of Iraq and is bent on making a wreck of this country too. Their intent is to destroy Social Security and eviscerate
Medicare and Medicaid through bankruptcy, to privatize everything in sight and leave this a third world country with a first-rate plutocracy and a military and police apparatus to keep it that way.

Bishop Warduni said to pray. “Nothing your peace movement has done so far has accomplished anything for us,” he said. “Pray!”

I don’t want to hear these words. But I have to wonder: is our pacifism the pacifism of the strong or the pacifism of the weak? Are we using the Weapons of the Spirit or do we reflect the corruption of the society that has given us rise? The Psalmist says there is no hope in horses and chariots but to call upon the name of the Lord. I’m trying. It’s never been so hard.