GRAND RAPIDS - The first two days of the Iraq war did not seem "that bad" to Kathy Kelly, in Iraq as part of the Iraq Peace Team. Iraqis went to the market and went about their regular business, and what bombing occurred was only at night and of a scale that did not elicit much concern from a people scarred with the experience of previous US bombing campaigns.

That all changed by the third night of the war, when the US military's much-touted "Shock and Awe" campaign went into effect. On that night alone, one billion dollars in bombs were dropped on Baghdad and surrounding cities. Buildings would sway with each bomb-blast and numerous civilians were killed. For the first time in the war, Kelly thought she might actually need the "crash-kits" prepared with necessities in case their hotel hit directly by a US bomb—a kit that included pliers for pulling shrapnel from the bombs' human victims.

While Iraqi adults tried to stay calm, Kelly says that the children knew something was wrong. She related one memorable exchange in which an adult told the children staying with them that they should go to sleep in the bomb shelter and finish their game of RISK in the morning. One of the children looked up and said, "Madame, we might not be here tomorrow"—a reality that many children were more willing to acknowledge than their parents.

Kathy Kelly is a co-founder of Voices in the Wilderness, a group formed in 1996 in order to end economic and military warfare against the people of Iraq. Voices in the Wilderness focuses on Iraqi civilians and was one of the first groups to oppose the UN endorsed, but US sponsored, sanctions against Iraq – sanctions that killed 500,000 children under the age of five – deaths once dismissed by former US Secretary of State Madame Albright in a somewhat notorious statement as being "…a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it."

Kelly's most recent visit to Iraq ended on April 19, 2003 and much of her talk centered on her experiences and encounters with Iraqi people. She spoke to a crowd of approximately fifty people at Calvin College in Grand Rapids. She told stories of Iraqi civilians coping with the reality of constant bombardment, Iraqi officers who permitted their troops to leave the slaughter on the battlefields, and stories of Iraqi solidarity with Palestinians killed under Israel's occupations.

While much of her speech focused on the experiences of Iraqi civilians, a surprising amount of time was spent on her encounters with US soldiers in Iraq. She explained "breaking the ice" with US soldiers on the day they came into Baghdad over with small talk about the Boston Red Sox and gifts of bottled water, relating to how she was "struck" by the age of the troops. She talked about one commander who approached her, knowing that she was against the war, and told her that "in the heat of battle, [he] made some hasty decisions" and that he will have "sleepless nights" as a result, but that it was important she not blame the troops who were following orders. Another soldier admitted that he was involved in a "battle" and almost certainly killed innocent civilians because the troops were unable to tell if they were soldiers or not and decided to kill them anyway. It was striking, given her direct experience with the devastation of Iraq as a result of US military and economic actions and various soldiers admissions, that she was largely uncritical of the US soldiers and their role in carrying out orders that resulted in death and destruction in Iraq. Instead, Kelly went to great lengths to humanize the US soldiers fighting the war while largely ignoring the destructive impact of the bombing on Iraq.

Notably missing from Kelly's speech was a detailed critique or even a description of current US policy and the reasons for and motivations behind the most recent Iraq war. At one point, she argued that the United States was engaged in an "ongoing low-intensity war of western culture against biodiversity," with the United States going to war for resources such as oil. She went onto argue that it was a question of "curbing US consumption"—yet there was analysis of global capitalism that drives consumption or the critical role played by neoliberalism in the current world order. Similarly, there was no analysis of the war's ramifications for the world (or even Iraq), nor was there any mention of the war's illegality by international law. While numerous authors have analyzed the Iraq war and the current global war on terror as part of a push by the United States for global domination, Kelly made no mention of the topic and did not expand her discussion beyond the immediate reality of bombs falling on Iraq. Certainly many Iraqi civilians, as related by Kelly, understood the US actions in a larger context—with one stating, "the only thing we were liberated from was the idea that the US wanted to save us."

Kelly is currently preparing for a three-month sentence in federal prison for a protest at during the annual demonstrations in Fort Benning, Georgia organized by School of Americas Watch. During her trial, she stated that it was the experience of having "held children and tried to comfort them under bombs" that made her actions at Fort Benning and her lifetime of non-violent resistance necessary.