Destination Baghdad

By Oliver Lukacs

Jan. 28 -- As President George W. Bush was delivering a State of the Union Address pundits billed as "a countdown to war," a woman in Santa Monica was packing her bags to join an international delegation headed to an embattled Baghdad likely targeted for destruction.

Fueled by the belief that the primary victims of the war will be women and children, Kelly Hayes-Raitt, a member of Santa Monica's Commission on the Status of Women, is one of ten women from Southern California joining a humanitarian mission to the Iraqi capital.

The delegation -- which includes women from Europe and Australia -- will visit a children's hospital, an orphanage and a bomb shelter where 480 civilians were killed during the Gulf War in hopes of bringing back to America the moral ammunition to ignite anti-war activism at home.

In addition to talking with Iraqi women, part of the delegation's 10-day mission is to deliver the vitamins and medical supplies that might have helped save some of the 500,000 children who died in the last decade under United Nations sanctions, Hayes-Raitt said.

"I want to give a face to the people whose lives and communities will be crushed by our bombs," she said. "I want to bring back what we don't talk about when we talk about war, which is what happens to women and children."

To rally opposition to the looming war, Hayes-Raitt hopes to speak to audiences, including junior high school and high school students, about her experiences. It is the young, she believes, who will be made "into killing machines" and sent off to fight the war, which in her "heart" she feels "is unjustified."

Those same young men sometimes return as war veterans to victimize their wives and children, she said. "We expose innocent children to warfare, and then they come back and we sit them down to Burger King and expect them to be all right," she said.

Hayes-Raitt, who owns Coast-to-Coast Community Campaigns, a political communication and organizing company that helped with Santa Monica's failed living wage campaign, will be bankrolling her own $3,000-trip.

She said she "feels privileged for the opportunity to do what others can't, but want to do."

The delegation organized by CodePINK-- an anti-war women's organization -- also expects to meet with the United Nations weapons inspectors to express support for their efforts. I addition, the women also hope to visit an oil refinery to express their belief as part of their Women's Pre-Emptive Strike for Peace that the proposed war against Iraq would be a war for oil.

For Hayes-Raitt -- a seasoned world traveler who has been to Papa New Guinea, China, Sri Lanka and India -- Iraq on the eve of a possible war is "the most volatile place" she's visited.

"I don't know what it's going to look like," said Hayes-Raitt, whose closest glimpse of a live war were the televised images taken by CNN journalists holed up in a hotel room during Desert Storm. But she expects to see a city and a people who have "suffered the ravages of war."

While her delegation likely will be monitored by an official Iraqi "minder," Hayes-Raitt said she is not worried about Saddam Hussein's regime.

"For the ten days that I'll be in Iraq, I'm more afraid of what my government will do than what the Iraqi government will do," she said.