By Cindy Sheehan
Inside the Red Zone: A Veteran For Peace Reports from Iraq, is an immensely important book in this day and age of news suppression from Iraq!
My friend, Mike Ferner, had the stunning courage to go to Iraq before the immoral and illegal invasion in 2003 and meet the people that our government was about to attack. Mike knew that the people that George Bush and company were demonizing were really just people and he wanted to go and see for himself.
Now with, as some estimates say, at least 100,000 innocent Iraqis killed and the country lying in shambles, one might say that such an incredibly important book may be coming out too late, but I don’t believe that. It may be too late for the poor unfortunates of Iraq and for American troops like my son, Casey, but it is not too late for the people still in harm’s way.
At the moment that I write this, the leaders of our world are banging the war drums for an invasion of Iran. This would be a disaster and I hope while you are reading this that you are breathing a sigh of relief that it hasn’t happened yet. But if the invasion doesn’t happen, you can thank peace activists like Mike Ferner for their courage and conviction.
Inside the Red Zone gives us a very rare look into the average life of an Iraqi person pre- and post-invasion. Except for a few documentaries and stories on the Internet, I can’t think of any mainstream journalist who has actually gone out among the people of the country. I remember stories of “journalists” riding in armored vehicles in the invasion wearing their body armor and showing the glory of our military might, but I don’t remember one story of how this invasion was affecting the people of Iraq. It just wasn’t done. The media have done a terrible job of putting a human face on this war.
In this age of comfort and consumerism above all else, Mike’s book is important in telling the story of ordinary Americans who left the comfort and relative safety of America to save other members of humanity.
My entire mission, aside from calling for the immediate and complete withdrawal of the troops from Iraq, is to rally our fellow Americans to go out of their comfort zones to make the world a better place and it gives me so much pleasure and encouragement to read stories of Americans who went above and beyond the call of duty to put a human face on tragedy and to try and prevent it from happening. This book is an important tool for this work.
I am called Mother Courage in Europe and Latin American countries and people always tell me how brave they think that I am. I am not brave. I do not fear anything. The people who are truly brave are the Mike Ferners of the world and the Kathy Kelleys and the Casey Sheehans.
To put one’s life on the line for friends as Casey did is remarkable, but to go and do it for strangers and people you most likely will never meet is sacred. The world needs more heroes and far fewer cowards. The cowards send us to war, the heroes try to prevent needless killing.
I hope you, the reader, enjoy this book for what it is, a great adventure story, but more importantly, as a call to action.
This book is a call for us, in any walk of life, to rejoin our humanity and the humanity of the world to put our lives on the line for peace with justice.
We will never have true and lasting peace in our world until the day that we forbid our leaders to demonize and marginalize other fellow human beings.
Mike Ferner gets this and I hope the world gets it too, before it is too late.
—Cindy Sheehan, January 2006
