A hero in Baghdad.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Editor's Note

Kathy Kelly is my idea of a hero. The founder of Voices in the Wilderness, she and her organization have done more than anyone to highlight the humanitarian disaster that economic sanctions have brought to the people of Iraq. Now she and her colleagues are putting themselves on the line in Baghdad, vowing to stay there even if Bush decides to attack.

This is taking civil disobedience to new levels of courage. I salute her for it. She is in the fine tradition of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Berrigans--individuals who take their convictions so seriously that they put their own freedom and sometimes their own lives at risk.

Even as I mourn the death of valiant Philip Berrigan, I'm pleased to be able to share Kathy Kelly's piece "A Witness to War" with you.

For this issue, we also wanted you to consider the perspectives of two other individuals who are well acquainted with the situation in Iraq: Joe Stork of Human Rights Watch and Faleh A. Jabar, a former Iraqi communist who had to flee Baghdad for his life back in 1978. Both caution those of us in the peace movement not to minimize the horrors of Saddam Hussein but to propose alternatives for dismantling the horrific Ba`th regime.

I'm grateful for their wise contributions.

On December 3, two other peace activists and I were supposed to address an anti-Iraq War teach-in at Memorial High School in Madison, Wisconsin. About twenty students and a faculty adviser had planned the teach-in over the course of a month. But the day before it was supposed to happen, a student involved with the Young Republicans went on a local rightwing radio program and complained that the teach-in was unbalanced. He and the host drummed up enough negative calls and e-mails to the school administration--some referring to the school district as "subversive and...