Peace comes from within. That’s what the Nobel Peace Prize winners said in Helena Cobban’s book, The Moral Achitecture of World Peace. When I read this I thought they were crazy—how could peace within stop armies, dismantle missiles, reroute misguided leaders?
Yet through all my work, I’ve come to understand that peace does indeed come from within. When you, in your heart, make a choice, decide to take one small or one large step for peace, it matters.
In 1990, I watched what was then a stand-off with Iraq, and wondered how one might send a message to Iraq, to ask them to leave Kuwait and join us in building a just peace. It was a very different message from the inflammatory language our president, Bush-father, was using when he stood before his generals in full regalia to call Sadam Hussein a Hitler.
History has been changed by messages moving from one person to the next. I launched a gesture, simple, neighbor-to-neighbor, once a week, to reach the people of Iraq: a candle in the window on Friday evenings, at the close of the Muslim day of rest.
Maybe 10,000 Americans participated. The New York Times printed my op-ed on Christmas Eve 1990, and then Koreans wrote that they read it with tears in their eyes, in the only other country where the U.N. had voted to go to war. The Op-Ed was translated into Arabic and carried to the Iraqi Women’s Federation by the former first lady of Greece, just a week before the war started. It touched them; there was not enough time to respond.
Was it naïve? Perhaps… but 100,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed in the dessert during that first Gulf War. Then hundreds of thousands of children died in the embargo—and now, well, you know the story.
With a small ray of hope, I send the following open letter to an Iraqi doctor who recently visited the U.S. as part of Code Pink’s delegation to bring peace and sanity to our world. I hope my message will reach her and that she will respond.
