Few but proud: US antiwar activists in Iraq

Mr. Hilfiker and others say Americans are unaware of what is being done in their name in Iraq - much less how war will further gut the population. "People are uncertain about this war," says Hilfiker, who works with inner city shelters in Washington. "I may be naive, but I believe Americans basically want to do the right thing.... People don't want to hunt and kill innocent people."

The trauma of Sept. 11 has made some Americans lose their moorings, however, and frightened them. "The question is: Can we separate out this fear, that overrides people's compassion?" asks Hilfiker, who says that his Christian beliefs impel him to speak out. "There are lots of people trying to tell the truth about the government here, about the weapons of mass destruction, but almost nobody is trying to tell the truth about the suffering of innocent people. Can Saddam use that? Sure ... but that doesn't negate the value of the truth."

There has been a personal cost, he admits. Hilfiker's sternest critic, a friend, "told me I was a turncoat, a Hanoi Jane [a derogatory reference to Jane Fonda's visit to North Vietnam in 1972], that I did not love my country, and was giving aid and comfort to the enemy."

Still, the antiwar message has sparked large rallies in the US and far larger ones in Europe. Recent polls show that less than half of Americans now want the US to invade Iraq without UN approval.

"If you look back to Vietnam, it took six years to get where we are now, and this war hasn't even started yet," says Peter Thompson, a human rights lawyer from Minneapolis who defended Vietnam-era draft dodgers and helped shape the first Bosnia indictment handed down by The Hague war crimes tribunal. "My wife asked me why I was going, with two kids at home. My family, our friends, and public opinion will hear what I am saying much more, just because I have come here," says the bow-tied Mr. Thompson, who does not plan to be in Iraq in case of war.

The price for pursuing that goal can be high, though, says Kathy Kelly, a former English and theology teacher from Chicago who has visited Iraq 18 times and is co-coordinator for Voices in the Wilderness. Her passport was confiscated in 1998, though reissued after several months.

The US Treasury Department last month imposed a $10,000 fine on Ms. Kelly, and another $10,000 on the group. They paid the fine with the equivalent of prewar, presanctions Iraqi dinars - today worth barely $3.

"In the US, the greatest hurdle to overcome is the widespread perception that there is only one person who matters in this country," says Kelly, who visits Iraqi families regularly. During the four-day US bombing campaign of December 1998, called Operation Desert Fox, Kelly slept on the floor with one family. Iraqis gave her a 35-pound chunk of a Tomahawk cruise-missile nose cone, that she managed to get back to the US. "They said: 'Take this back to your country. Merry Christmas,' " she recalls.

"After Sept. 11, Americans thought there was going to be another [Al Qaeda] attack on July 4," Kelly says. "Here, every single day people are living under the threat there could be a new US attack" that will be more devastating than the 1991 war.

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