MAY 2007

books

Where Have All the Leaders Gone?

American Empire | Books

Excerpt: Where Have All the Leaders Gone?

By Lee Iacocca with Catherine Whitney

04/11/07 "ICH" -- -- -Had Enough? Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, "Stay the course." Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I'll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out! You might think I'm getting senile, that I've gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies.Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don't need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we're fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That's not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for.

I've had enough. How about you? I'll go a step further. You can't call yourself a patriot if you're not outraged. This is a fight I'm ready and willing to have. My friends tell me to calm down. They say, "Lee, you're eighty-two years old. Leave the rage to the young people." I'd love to, as soon as I can pry them away from their iPods for five seconds and get them to pay attention. I'm going to speak up because it's my patriotic duty. I think people will listen to me. They say I have a reputation as a straight shooter. So I'll tell you how I see it, and it's not pretty, but at least it's real. I'm hoping to strike a nerve in those young folks who say they don't vote because they don't trust politicians to represent their interests. Hey, America, wake up. These guys work for us. Who Are These Guys, Anyway? Why are we in this mess? How did we end up with this crowd in Washington? Well, we voted for them, or at least some of us did. But I'll tell you what we didn't do. We didn't agree to suspend the Constitution. We didn't agree to stop asking questions or demanding answers. Some of us are sick and tired of people who call free speech treason. Where I come from that's a dictatorship, not a democracy. And don't tell me it's all the fault of right-wing Republicans or liberal Democrats. That's an intellectually lazy argument, and it's part of the reason we're in this stew. We're not just a nation of factions. We're a people. We share common principles and ideals. And we rise and fall together.

Where are the voices of leaders who can inspire us to action and make us stand taller? What happened to the strong and resolute party of Lincoln? What happened to the courageous, populist party of FDR and Truman? There was a time in this country when the voices of great leaders lifted us up and made us want to do better. Where have all the leaders gone?

The Test of a Leader
I've never been Commander in Chief, but I've been a CEO. I understand a few things about leadership at the top. I've figured out nine points, not ten (I don't want people accusing me of thinking I'm Moses). I call them the "Nine Cs of Leadership." They're not fancy or complicated. Just clear, obvious qualities that every true leader should have. We should look at how the current administration stacks up. Like it or not, this crew is going to be around until January 2009. Maybe we can learn something before we go to the polls in 2008. Then let's be sure we use the leadership test to screen the candidates who say they want to run the country. It's up to us to choose wisely.

A leader has to show CURIOSITY. He has to listen to people outside of the "Yes, sir" crowd in his inner circle. He has to read voraciously, because the world is a big, complicated place. George W. Bush brags about never reading a newspaper. "I just scan the headlines," he says. Am I hearing this right? He's the President of the United States and he never reads a newspaper? Thomas Jefferson once said, "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter." Bush disagrees. As long as he gets his daily hour in the gym, with Fox News piped through the sound system, he's ready to go.

If a leader never steps outside his comfort zone to hear different ideas, he grows stale. If he doesn't put his beliefs to the test, how does he know he's right? The inability to listen is a form of arrogance. It means either you think you already know it all, or you just don't care. Before the 2006 election, George Bush made a big point of saying he didn't listen to the polls. Yeah, that's what they all say when the polls stink. But maybe he should have listened, because 70 percent of the people were saying he was on the wrong track. It took a "thumping" on election day to wake him up, but even then you got the feeling he wasn't listening so much as he was calculating how to do a better job of convincing everyone he was right.

A leader has to be CREATIVE, go out on a limb, be willing to try something different. You know, think outside the box. George Bush prides himself on never changing, even as the world around him is spinning out of control. God forbid someone should accuse him of flip-flopping. There's a disturbingly messianic fervor to his certainty. Senator Joe Biden recalled a conversation he had with Bush a few months after our troops marched into Baghdad. Joe was in the Oval Office outlining his concerns to the President, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanded Iraqi army, the problems securing the oil fields. "The President was serene," Joe recalled. "He told me he was sure that we were on the right course and that all would be well. 'Mr. President,' I finally said, 'how can you be so sure when you don't yet know all the facts?'" Bush then reached over and put a steadying hand on Joe's shoulder. "My instincts," he said. "My instincts." Joe was flabbergasted. He told Bush,"Mr. President, your instincts aren't good enough." Joe Biden sure didn't think the matter was settled. And, as we all know now, it wasn't. Leadership is all about managing change, whether you're leading a company or leading a country. Things change, and you get creative. You adapt. Maybe Bush was absent the day they covered that at Harvard Business School.

A leader has to COMMUNICATE. I'm not talking about running off at the mouth or spouting sound bites. I'm talking about facing reality and telling the truth. Nobody in the current administration seems to know how to talk straight anymore. Instead, they spend most of their time trying to convince us that things are not really as bad as they seem. I don't know if it's denial or dishonesty, but it can start to drive you crazy after a while. Communication has to start with telling the truth, even when it's painful. The war in Iraq has been, among other things, a grand failure of communication. Bush is like the boy who didn't cry wolf when the wolf was at the door. After years of being told that all is well, even as the casualties and chaos mount, we've stopped listening to him.

A leader has to be a person of CHARACTER. That means knowing the difference between right and wrong and having the guts to do the right thing. Abraham Lincoln once said, "If you want to test a man's character, give him power." George Bush has a lot of power. What does it say about his character? Bush has shown a willingness to take bold action on the world stage because he has the power, but he shows little regard for the grievous consequences. He has sent our troops (not to mention hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens) to their deaths. For what? To build our oil reserves? To avenge his daddy because Saddam Hussein once tried to have him killed? To show his daddy he's tougher? The motivations behind the war in Iraq are questionable, and the execution of the war has been a disaster. A man of character does not ask a single soldier to die for a failed policy.

A leader must have COURAGE. I'm talking about balls. (That even goes for female leaders.) Swagger isn't courage. Tough talk isn't courage. George Bush comes from a blue-blooded Connecticut family, but he likes to talk like a cowboy. You know, My gun is bigger than your gun. Courage in the twenty-first century doesn't mean posturing and bravado. Courage is a commitment to sit down at the negotiating table and talk.

If you're a politician, courage means taking a position even when you know it will cost you votes. Bush can't even make a public appearance unless the audience has been handpicked and sanitized. He did a series of so-called town hall meetings last year, in auditoriums packed with his most devoted fans. The questions were all softballs.

To be a leader you've got to have CONVICTION, a fire in your belly. You've got to have passion. You've got to really want to get something done. How do you measure fire in the belly? Bush has set the all-time record for number of vacation days taken by a U.S. President, four hundred and counting. He'd rather clear brush on his ranch than immerse himself in the business of governing. He even told an interviewer that the high point of his presidency so far was catching a seven-and-a-half-pound perch in his hand-stocked lake. It's no better on Capitol Hill. Congress was in session only ninety-seven days in 2006. That's eleven days less than the record set in 1948, when President Harry Truman coined the term do-nothing Congress. Most people would expect to be fired if they worked so little and had nothing to show for it. But Congress managed to find the time to vote itself a raise. Now, that's not leadership.

A leader should have CHARISMA. I'm not talking about being flashy. Charisma is the quality that makes people want to follow you. It's the ability to inspire. People follow a leader because they trust him. That's my definition of charisma. Maybe George Bush is a great guy to hang out with at a barbecue or a ball game. But put him at a global summit where the future of our planet is at stake, and he doesn't look very presidential. Those frat-boy pranks and the kidding around he enjoys so much don't go over that well with world leaders. Just ask German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who received an unwelcome shoulder massage from our President at a G-8 Summit. When he came up behind her and started squeezing, I thought she was going to go right through the roof.

A leader has to be COMPETENT. That seems obvious, doesn't it? You've got to know what you're doing. More important than that, you've got to surround yourself with people who know what they're doing. Bush brags about being our first MBA President. Does that make him competent? Well, let's see. Thanks to our first MBA President, we've got the largest deficit in history, Social Security is on life support, and we've run up a half-a-trillion-dollar price tag (so far) in Iraq. And that's just for starters. A leader has to be a problem solver, and the biggest problems we face as a nation seem to be on the back burner.

You can't be a leader if you don't have COMMON SENSE. I call this Charlie Beacham's rule. When I was a young guy just starting out in the car business, one of my first jobs was as Ford's zone manager in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. My boss was a guy named Charlie Beacham, who was the East Coast regional manager. Charlie was a big Southerner, with a warm drawl, a huge smile, and a core of steel. Charlie used to tell me, "Remember, Lee, the only thing you've got going for you as a human being is your ability to reason and your common sense. If you don't know a dip of horseshit from a dip of vanilla ice cream, you'll never make it." George Bush doesn't have common sense. He just has a lot of sound bites. You know, Mr.they'll-welcome-us-as-liberators-no-child-left-behind-heck-of-a-job-Brownie-mission-accomplished Bush. Former President Bill Clinton once said, "I grew up in an alcoholic home. I spent half my childhood trying to get into the reality-based world, and I like it here." I think our current President should visit the real world once in a while.

The Biggest C is CRISIS. Leaders are made, not born. Leadership is forged in times of crisis. It's easy to sit there with your feet up on the desk and talk theory. Or send someone else's kids off to war when you've never seen a battlefield yourself. It's another thing to lead when your world comes tumbling down. On September 11, 2001, we needed a strong leader more than any other time in our history. We needed a steady hand to guide us out of the ashes. Where was George Bush? He was reading a story about a pet goat to kids in Florida when he heard about the attacks. He kept sitting there for twenty minutes with a baffled look on his face. It's all on tape. You can see it for yourself. Then, instead of taking the quickest route back to Washington and immediately going on the air to reassure the panicked people of this country, he decided it wasn't safe to return to the White House. He basically went into hiding for the day, and he told Vice President Dick Cheney to stay put in his bunker. We were all frozen in front of our TVs, scared out of our wits, waiting for our leaders to tell us that we were going to be okay, and there was nobody home. It took Bush a couple of days to get his bearings and devise the right photo op at Ground Zero. That was George Bush's moment of truth, and he was paralyzed. And what did he do when he'd regained his composure? He led us down the road to Iraq, a road his own father had considered disastrous when he was President. But Bush didn't listen to Daddy. He listened to a higher father. He prides himself on being faith based, not reality based. If that doesn't scare the crap out of you,I don't know what will.

A Hell of a Mess.
So here's where we stand. We're immersed in a bloody war with no plan for winning and no plan for leaving. We're running the biggest deficit in the history of the country. We're losing the manufacturing edge to Asia, while our once-great companies are getting slaughtered by health care costs. Gas prices are skyrocketing, and nobody in power has a coherent energy policy. Our schools are in trouble. Our borders are like sieves. The middle class is being squeezed every which way. These are times that cry out for leadership.

But when you look around, you've got to ask: "Where have all the leaders gone?" Where are the curious, creative communicators? Where are the people of character, courage, conviction, competence, and common sense? I may be a sucker for alliteration, but I think you get the point.

Name me a leader who has a better idea for homeland security than making us take off our shoes in airports and throw away our shampoo? We've spent billions of dollars building a huge new bureaucracy, and all we know how to do is react to things that have already happened. Name me one leader who emerged from the crisis of Hurricane Katrina. Congress has yet to spend a single day evaluating the response to the hurricane, or demanding accountability for the decisions that were made in the crucial hours after the storm. Everyone's hunkering down, fingers crossed, hoping it doesn't happen again. Now, that's just crazy. Storms happen. Deal with it. Make a plan. Figure out what you're going to do the next time.

Name me an industry leader who is thinking creatively about how we can restore our competitive edge in manufacturing. Who would have believed that there could ever be a time when "the Big Three" referred to Japanese car companies? How did this happen, and more important, what are we going to do about it? <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]-->Name me a government leader who can articulate a plan for paying down the debt, or solving the energy crisis, or managing the health care problem. The silence is deafening. But these are the crises that are eating away at our country and milking the middle class dry. <!--[endif]-->

I have news for the gang in Congress. We didn't elect you to sit on your asses and do nothing and remain silent while our democracy is being hijacked and our greatness is being replaced with mediocrity. What is everybody so afraid of? That some bobblehead on Fox News will call them a name? Give me a break. Why don't you guys show some spine for a change? Had Enough? Hey, I'm not trying to be the voice of gloom and doom here. I'm trying to light a fire. I'm speaking out because I have hope. I believe in America. In my lifetime I've had the privilege of living through some of America's greatest moments. I've also experienced some of our worst crises, the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, the 1970s oil crisis, and the struggles of recent years culminating with 9/11. If I've learned one thing, it's this: You don't get anywhere by standing on the sidelines waiting for somebody else to take action. Whether it's building a better car or building a better future for our children, we all have a role to play. That's the challenge I'm raising in this book. It's a call to action for people who, like me, believe in America. It's not too late, but it's getting pretty close. So let's shake off the horseshit and go to work. Let's tell 'em all we've had enough

Open Letter to Lee Iacocca

http://pcapostate.blogspot.com/2007/04/open-letter
-to-lee-iacocca.html

By Curt Maynard

Thanks Iacocca,

Former Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca has just finished a book entitled “Where Have all the Leaders Gone” in which he excoriates Dubya, our traitor and chief, by acknowledging that the war in Iraq, its subsequent occupation and our continuing presence there are ALL based on a “pack of lies.” Gee - thanks Lee; where the hell were you when this became obvious more than four years ago?

Iacocca’s book looks interesting enough based upon its excerpts, a few of which actually indicate Iacocca “gets it.” But one wonders if he really does? One excerpt in particular suggests that Iacocca knows about the neo-Bolsheviks in Washington, but alas, even this great man is apparently hesitant to call a “spade a spade.”

“Who are these guys anyway? Why are we in this mess? How did we end up with this crowd in Washington? Well, we voted for them -- or at least some of us did. But I'll tell you what we didn't do. We didn't agree to suspend the Constitution. We didn't agree to stop asking questions or demanding answers. Some of us are sick and tired of people who call free speech treason. Where I come from that's a dictatorship, not a democracy... And don't tell me it's all the fault of right-wing Republicans or liberal Democrats. That's an intellectually lazy argument, and it's part of the reason we're in this stew. We're not just a nation of factions. We're a people. We share common principles and ideals. And we rise and fall together.”[1] Now, If I were to actually write Iacocca a letter, it would look something like this: Dear Lee,

Who indeed! Lee, you’re not doing us any good by tap dancing around the answer to your own rhetorical question. You know as well as I do who it is, why won’t you say? Who has done this before Lee? Precedent was set more than ninety years ago when the same Bolshevik ideologues took over Russia in much the same way, suspending any and every tenet of human decency and pretty much for the same reason, to prevent public criticism and exposure! They’re doing the same thing now Lee, but they’re doing it behind the cloak of other minorities; you’ve got to know by now that the entire point behind the initiation of “hate crime” legislation [and the associated “hate speech” provisions] is ultimately to suppress criticism of them. Lee, they are the ones that injected the idea that our Constitutional guarantees of free speech are “hateful” and “treasonous,” you’ve got to know this. This isn’t something our Yale cheerleader thought of by himself [Damn him anyway]. Lee, are you going to stand silently as they continue this assault on our right to freely speak our minds. Are you going to let allow our society to go down the drain or are you going to do as Henry Ford did before you and tell the truth? In your book you implored the reader to “wake up,” but you apparently haven’t finished your nap yet. Why?

One of your “nine C’s of leadership” includes “character”. You wrote:

“A leader has to be a person of character. That means knowing the difference between right and wrong and having the guts to do the right thing… A leader must have courage; I'm talking about balls.”

I’m waiting Lee, when will you grab your balls and do the right thing! I promise I’ll be behind you all the way, as will most of America. You don’t actually believe the media’s rhetoric do you? You ought to know by now that anyone that matters no longer pays the mainstream establishment media any attention nor lends it any credibility – they used up all their capital and more covering up 9-11. Lee, nobody of any consequence believes CNN, MSNBC, FOX, etc… wake up!

Lee, I know you know who is behind the war in Iraq and why it was launched in the first place. You don’t seem to have a great deal of faith in the “popular” idea that the Iraq war is about oil, a convenient but unsupportable scapegoat/chimera, based upon the following excerpt which clearly reveals, at least in my mind, that the reasons you list with questions marks behind them, probably aren’t the real agenda:

“He [Bush] has sent our troops (not to mention hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens) to their deaths -- for what? To build our oil reserves? To avenge his daddy because Saddam Hussein once tried to have him killed? To show his daddy he's tougher? The motivations behind the war in Iraq are questionable, and the execution of the war has been a disaster. A man of character does not ask a single soldier to die for a failed policy.”

You rightly excoriate Bush and Congress for being apathetic and uninvolved, for spending more time on vacation at the ranch than in Washington, but you neglect to mention that there really isn’t any reason for them to be in Washington based upon the undeniable fact that our government is being run from New York and Tel Aviv anyway. How come? If you’re afraid, you’d be a helluva lot safer by coming out and emphatically stating this than beating around the bush and making these people paranoid that you might just become a loud mouthed populist at some point in the future. Another way to absolutely guarantee your own safety is to make it perfectly clear now that you are not going to apologize for any comments you might make in the future. In order for the media to capitalize on “nappy headed hoe” type comments; the media has to be certain you’ll apologize. Refusal to do so completely neuters them and makes them look stupid.

In your book you wrote that “charisma” is an important quality in a leader and that people tend to follow a leader “because they trust him.” Lee, this is an important point and I’m glad you brought it up. You see Lee; the majority of the intelligent people in this country no longer trust Bush or the Republican Party. But here’s the kicker, they no longer trust the Democrats either. Both parties have squandered the good will of their base – they have spit in the face of their constituencies, when they open their mouths, they habitually lie, and the American people have figured it out. Lee, you don’t expect us to believe that Hillary Clinton is really a frontrunner do you? Obama? John McCain? Rudy Giuliani? Come on Lee, too many people already know that these people are handpicked front men, millions upon millions of people have already seen every last one of them prostrate themselves before AIPAC, we aren’t that stupid. One of them will undoubtedly be elected in 2008 but it won’t be because they received the majority of the vote, it’ll be because another election gets hijacked and “good people” like yourself refuse to stand up and say so. You wake up!

Another thing Lee, you seem to insinuate in your book that Bush failed as a leader on 9-11 because he sat with a perplexed look on his face for twenty minutes in a Florida classroom after being informed that America was under attack, as if there was really anything else he should have been doing. Lee, are you the last person on the face of the earth that believes the “official government version” of what happened on 9-11? It was an inside job stupid! Bush did what he was instructed to do, nothing! This isn’t to say that a coward of the magnitude of Bush would have been able to do anything were he not complicit, but nonetheless our traitor and chief did just what he was suppose to do, and that was nothing. It’s okay Lee, you can say this too, everyone knows it; it isn’t a secret and/or a “conspiracy theory” any longer – it’s pretty much mainstream, although the media would like you to believe otherwise. I live in the heart of Texas at present and it’s difficult for me to find any Bush supporters anymore, they took off their bumper stickers a year ago [When Bush exposed himself fully by insisting that America absorb 20 million illegal aliens] and I haven’t found anyone in the last nine months that will openly admit to believing in the governments version of 9-11. Sure, some of them might go home and tell their husbands/wives they still believe that load of bullshit, but they’re too embarrassed to admit as much publicly.

Lastly, I couldn’t help but note this paragraph you wrote:

“I have news for the gang in Congress. We didn't elect you to sit on your asses and do nothing and remain silent while our democracy is being hijacked and our greatness is being replaced with mediocrity. What is everybody so afraid of? That some bobblehead on Fox News will call them a name? Give me a break. Why don't you guys show some spine for a change?”

Thanks Lee, you took the words right out of my mouth. Now, why don’t you grab your balls, take your own advice, and tell us all just how kosher Washington DC has become? Regards, Curt Maynard

[1] http://www.leadershipnow.com/leadershop/9781416532477excerpt.html   http://pcapostate.blogspot.com/2007/04/open-letter-to-lee-iacocca.html

Le pin et l'olivier, ou Les charmes discrets de la Terre sainte

A New Book by Israel Shamir is out in French

and it is available from the Amazon http://www.amazon.com/lolivier-charmes-discrets-Terre-sainte/dp/141966056X for $20.99 +p.p.

While this is definitely the best way of buying it if you live in the US or Canada, but for the French readers in France the shipping may be expensive, so you can buy it locally from EPE, chez M. Sfar, 1 rue Cassini 75014, Paris;  plumenclume@yahoo.com for € 25 +p.p.
A New Book by Israel Shamir is out in French

Darwin's letters

Intelligent design? I cannot believe in it, wrote scientist to Christian correspondents

By Anthony Barnes, Arts and Media Correspondent ;(excerpt)

Published: 08 April 2007

As he crafted his seminal work, On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin crossed intellects with some of the finest minds of his age, testing and refining a theory that would change the very nature of mankind's view of itself.

Now, previously unpublished letters reveal the thinking behind the book that unleashed a scientific and religious furore in the 19th century.

The correspondence with Darwin's friend and theological sparring partner Asa Gray, an American botanist and God-fearing Christian, spans decades, beginning in 1854, five years before the publication of Origin, and continuing until Darwin's death in 1882.

Despite Gray's committed Christianity, he went on to become Darwin's greatest champion in the US, where ideas about so-called intelligent design have re-ignited the debate about creationism.

Darwin himself had a trying relationship with God. Though he was a firm believer in his early years, his theories forced him to question his faith and any commitment to Christianity that remained was extinguished with the death of his daughter in 1851. In one letter to another correspondent, Charles Lyell, he made his position clear: "Many persons seem to make themselves quite easy about immortality & the existence of a personal God by intuition; & I suppose that I must differ from such persons, for I do not feel any innate conviction on any such points." The relationship between Darwin and Gray was good natured, if combative. In one letter, Darwin tells Gray: "An innocent and good man stands under a tree and is killed by a flash of lightning. Do you believe that God designedly killed this man? Many or most persons do believe this. I can't and don't."

The letters have been re-cast into a play, Re:Design, intended to bring Darwin's work to a new audience.

Darwin, who was born in Shrewsbury in 1809, developed his ideas about the "transmutation" of species after his five-year voyage as a geologist on HMS Beagle, which eventually evolved into his theory of natural selection. Such talk was viewed as heresy by his contemporaries who felt it undermined their convictions on divine creation.

The online archive tackling his difficult relationship with religion features some 5,000 letters.

Dr Paul White of the Darwin Correspondence Project said: "The letters reveal that debate over design engaged a wide range of participants, and in a manner that was both frank and respectful of differences in religious belief. In contrast to much of the current debate, Darwin and his circle of correspondents seem more tolerant and more humble."

A Peacemaker's Stories

ZNet Commentary
April 10, 2007
By Seth Sandronsky

Reviewing Kathy Kelly's book Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison (Petrolia, CA: CounterPunch Books; Oakland: AK Press, 2005).

In a civilized nation, Kathy Kelly's peacemaking activities would make her widely known. Thus she has scant name recognition in the US. Against that backdrop, Kelly's book can help correct this situation.

In her book, we find compelling stories on what the US government does to harm human beings in the name of safety and security overseas and at home. Opposing this barbarity and cruelty, Kelly argues in deed and word for a nonviolent pacifism of resistance. Weighing 105 lbs., she is a resolute force in the face of tyrannical authority for the improvement of all humanity in the tradition of Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Kelly's book has four parts. In part one, we learn of her working-class, Irish-Catholic roots in Chicago. Such personalization works well, helping us to understand the life processes that empowered her to make repeated humanitarian missions to the Balkans, Caribbean, Central America and the Middle East. A pivotal point in her life came in 1977 when she entered the Catholic Worker movement in her hometown.

Kelly meets Karl Meyer, her former husband and mentor with whom she remains a friend. He helps teach her how to work with others to resist oppression by employing the principles of pacifism to counter the dominant assumptions about armed violence as a means to settle differences.

Kelly blossoms in the light of the Catholic Worker group's "collective determination" to better the human rights of the globe's poorest people as the highest form of personal responsibility. She meets Father Roy Bourgeois, a charismatic priest with the Maryknoll religious order who protests US intervention in Central America. He impresses her by receiving a prison sentence for publicly demonstrating against his friend's death at the hands of a Central American death squad trained by the US government.

Two other influential people in Kelly's life are Ernest Bromley and Maurice McCracken. Together, they teach her by example about militant nonviolence in the face of arrest and mistreatment-how to conquer fear and "catch courage." From this duo Kelly learns: "Courage is the ability to control your fear, and courage is contagious." There is more to her pacifism: "I'd add to those definitions an additional truism that can help dissolve fear: treat other people right, and you won't have to be afraid of them."

In the book's second and longest part, Kelly bears witness, from Iraq, to the triumphs and tragedies of ordinary people during 14 years of trade sanctions, weapons inspections, US/UK bombing missions, and, finally, the US-led invasion in March 2003 and continuing occupation. Co-founder of Voices in the Wilderness, a pacifist group begun in her Chicago apartment to help ordinary Iraqis under the US-led UN economic embargo that weakened them and strengthened former leader Saddam Hussein, Kelly deconstructs American elites' view of that nation and its suffering people. To that end, she sheds ample light on the human rights nightmare in Iraqi hospitals and households, under-reported in America's corporate-owned press. VitW has sent 70 humanitarian delegations to Iraq to bring its suffering populace medicine and toys. For their efforts, the group earned the wrath of the US Treasury Department under President Bill Clinton and his Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright. For Albright, the deaths of a half-million Iraqi children from the Iraq sanctions is deemed "worth it" in a CBS TV interview. If that is not an expression of barbarism, we need a new definition of the term.

Kelly, with a deft ear and eye, humanizes ordinary Iraqi people-children, fathers and mothers. In her vivid prose, we meet Iraqis who perished and others who survived sanctions that prevented the nation from having normal commercial relations with other countries. Dr. Raad Towalha struggles to heal the sick with a lack of medical resources. Similarly, Umm Zainab, an Iraqi mother of nine, battles daily poverty to provide for her family under aerial bombardment before the March 2003 "Shock and Awe" attack.

Kelly writes from the Al Fanar hotel in Baghdad as that imperial air attack begins after historic antiwar protests by millions of people worldwide. "Often you could feel the floors shudder and hear the windows rattle. When an ear-splitting, gut-wrenching blast would shake the building, you could see the younger kids quickly checking the adults' faces. If the adults seemed calm, the kids would note it and go on with play, games, meals, and conversation. Frequently, the response of Iraqi friends would be a clicking of the tongue, then 'Laish, laish?'-Why, why?" US mass media did not file such reports on Iraqi civilians.

In part three, Kelly details daily life for her and other incarcerated women. One penal institution she writes from is the Pekin Federal Prison Camp. Kelly's "crime?" She nonviolently protested at the US Army School of the Americas in spring 2004, joining with others to demand the end of combat training of soldiers there. Subsequently, these "graduates" of the SOA (re-branded the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) return to their Caribbean and Latin American nations to maim and murder fellow citizens.

Dubbed "Missiles" by her prison mates, Kelly cogently captures the heavy price paid by working-class women in the racist US war on drugs, worsened by mandatory minimum sentencing. Imprisonment deeply wounds women's relations with family members on the outside, she explains. In these prisoners' stories, we meet Earline, Ernestina and Terry, who detail such hurt and humiliation. In response, they and Kelly provide and receive mutual support to one another within the confines of the prison walls. Disproportionately nonwhite, the women prisoners are throwaway people in the era of neo-liberal economic reform that has buried the practice and theory of a "rational capitalism" while trumpeting the virtues of possessive individualism.

I winced, however, reading Kelly write that "we" Americans choose empire and its consumptive lifestyle. This is an analytical limitation. Working people of the US do not express their politico-economic power via consumption. Class power flows from the financial and industrial forces that control production and distribution, and the political system to which it is tightly linked.

A foreword by Milan Rai, founder of VitW in the UK, provides a chronology of the Iraq sanctions between 1990 and 2000. His critique of that barbarous decade is an education in itself. Heidi Holliday's prologue offers a brief history of VitW from December 1995 to October 2003 (a continued history is at www.vitw.org), which blazed the trail for the peace-making efforts of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. Currently, VCN is involved with the Occupation Project across America, sitting in at congresspersons' offices to pressure them to cut new funding for the Iraq war.

Kelly, who has been arrested repeatedly for protesting war, has been a high school and community college teacher in the Chicago area for over three decades. In addition, she is a multiple nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, anti-nuclear weapons protester and war tax resister. Significantly, Kelly's book can be read by high school and college students. Their political actions for a better world can help to build on what she and like-minded people have been and are doing to make that social reality emerge.

Seth Sandronsky is a member of Sacramento Area Peace Action and a co-editor of Because People Matter, Sacramento's progressive paper www.bpmnews.org/. He can be reached at: bpmnews@nicetechnology.com.Sandronsky A Peacemaker's Stories Apr 10