Ramzi Kysia, 34, grew up in Royal Oak, Michigan, a leafy suburb of Detroit. Kysia is a Lebanese-American who has spent about five years living and working in the Middle East, most recently in Iraq. He has worked for Voices in the Wilderness, a peace group that has worked in Iraq since 1996, and for another group called EPIC (Education for Peace in Iraq Center).

Kysia went to Iraq before the war last year with a group calling itself the Iraq Peace Team. It goes without saying that his efforts and others—such as peace marches joined by hundreds of thousands of people in London, San Francisco and elsewhere—failed to prevent the 2003 invasion.

Kysia has a unique perspective, drawn from experiences that took him to Iraq in 1997 and in subsequent years, when he saw the devastation left by two previous wars and years of economic embargo. Following his move to Iraq before the 2003 invasion, he was expelled by the Iraqi government on April 1. He returned 10 days later from Jordan. He stayed on until September, and plans to return at some point, though it’s not clear when.

Lately Kysia has been touring this country talking about his experience in Iraq and the Middle East. He stays in regular contact with people he met in Iraq who are still there.

The Weekly caught up with Kysia earlier in the week for a discussion, which is excerpted below. (The full interview can be found at www.montereycountyweekly.com.)

How long did you live in Iraq? I was in the Middle East for two years. I was in Iraq for a year—for seven months before the war and five months after.

What was Iraq like before the invasion, under Saddam Hussein, and what was it like after the invasion?

We’re talking about two different things—how Iraq was for me and how Iraq was for Iraqis. Obviously [as] an American going to Iraq under Saddam Hussein, I was extremely privileged. I was not someone who had to worry about being arrested by the government or tortured. The worst that could happen to me is they could kick me out of the country.

For me, the weeks before the war were absolutely surreal. The government seemed to be in complete denial, and wasn’t willing to do anything to try and avoid the war. And the reasons being given for the war by the Bush Administration seemed to be obviously false. The US was pushing forward with ridiculous reasons for going to war.

I mean we can talk about the fact that they didn’t find weapons of mass destruction, but in January of 2003, when we had that British dossier about Iraqi weapons capabilities, it was out for two weeks before somebody noticed that it had been plagiarized from someone’s masters thesis, off the Internet, written 12 years earlier. How surprised can any of us be that these reasons turned out not to be true? It seemed to be pretty clear before the war.

Do you feel the message of peace from Voices in the Wilderness was heard or was it drowned out?

I was involved in three different things before the war. One, I worked with journalists to try to help them set up stories. So I’ve been Iraq with different delegations on and off going back to 1997. So we certainly got to know ordinary people in Iraq, and in focusing on the sanctions, I think we came up with a fairly good understanding of what was happening with the Oil for Food program, what was happening in Iraqi hospitals what the consequences of war and embargo had been for Iraq. Trying to find those stories and getting journalists to pay attention to them was a lot of our work.

And also getting to know the journalists who were there and what kind of stories they were interested in and seeing if we could help with people we knew. The Washington Post wanted to do a story on an Iraqi family who had a son in the military. And we happened to know a family.

In the Iraqi military or the US?

The Iraqi. There was a family and one of their 18-year-olds had been forced into the army.

I also worked at trying to get dialogues going between students in Iraq and in the United States. In the month or so before the war we were able to set up a radio dialogue between students at UC-Santa Barbara and students at Baghdad University. And were able to do another dialogue between students at Columbia and Baghdad University that was broadcast on Democracy Now .

Do you feel like your message made it into the mainstream press? Some say the media got browbeaten into this thing and were not as critical as they should have been going into war and then during the war.

There are two reasons I really criticize the Western press, and particularly the US press. One was not putting enough of a critical eye on the claims the Bush administration were making about weapons of mass destruction. There really seemed to be this default position that ‘we are really going to accept at face value what the government tells us, and we’re not really going to dig too much into it.’

The job of the media seemed to be reporting spin. We should look at what the facts on the ground are, and those facts were not hidden. You had the primary sources of eight and a half years of UN weapons inspections in Iraq that were available, publicly available, and I think if anyone had bothered to go and look at the history of the weapons inspections teams in Iraq and read the reports they’d issued, the picture of Iraq’s weapons capabilities would have been much different from the what Bush Administration said. And I don’t think anybody really did that, and I fault the media for that quite strongly.

The other piece of it, I don’t think the media did a very good job of paying attention to the human side of this problem. The focus seemed to be on the political conflict and if it would lead to war, and if it did lead to war, would the war be successful, what were the tactics.

The actual human side, how ordinary people in Iraq were affected by war, how they were affected in 1991, how they were affected under 13 years of sanctions, what would happen to them in another war, did not seem to be an issue of concern.

What evidence of harm did you see coming out of those 13 years of sanctions? What is a day-to-day example? I know there was food rationing but please explain what it is you saw.

To say there was food rationing is like saying Mt. Everest is a hill. That’s true but it’s a little more than that. Iraq for 13 years and to this day was giving a monthly food ration to 25 million people. It’s the largest humanitarian food program in world history.

When the United Nations came in 1997 with the Oil for Food program, it immediately became the largest UN program in its history and its budget was larger than the budget of the rest of the Secretariat.

You had a situation where the United Nations and NGOs like the Red Cross were reporting that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children had died as a direct result of poverty and shortages caused by the embargo. I mean hundreds of thousands of children.

I’ve heard that too, but do you know families that would be able to say ‘Yes, we lost a daughter’?

The first time I went to Iraq was in August of 1997. We visited hospitals all over the country and I can tell you I saw firsthand ward after ward of starving children. Children with oversized heads, distended bellies, their ribs showing, it was horrifying. And it was the result of a lot of different factors coming together.

One is that we bombed their electrical system in 1991. That lead to the collapse of water and sanitation. We had sanctions that prevented the importation of equipment that Iraq needed to rebuild its water and sanitation. Under the sanctions we had half a million tons of raw sewage being dumped into Iraq’s rivers every single day, and water being drawn from the same rivers for drinking. Waterborne illnesses—typhoid, cholera, dysentery—were just endemic throughout the entire country, which was not the case in the 1980s.

Worst of all the sanctions impoverished everyone in the country. I mean, there’s 60 percent unemployment in Iraq right now, a year after the end of sanctions, a year after the end of Saddam.

Without jobs or income coming into the country, everybody was impoverished. And everybody was on this giant breadline.

Part of the problem here is sanctions, part of it is the 1991 war and damage to the infrastructure but part of it is Saddam Hussein. This is a hard question to answer but is Iraq better off now than it was under Saddam Hussein?

See, this is an impossible question, because Iraq is different. Some things are better, yes, much better. Some things are worse. Security is much worse. With a fascist totalitarian state, crime wasn’t really a problem.

Talk to people in Iraq they will tell you a couple of contradictory things. One the one hand they will tell you they’re very glad Saddam Hussein is gone and they wouldn’t want to change that. One the other hand I think they’ll tell you their lives are more insecure than they were a year ago, and they would very much like to change that.

What have your friends in Iraq been saying in the last few weeks?

The Iraqis I know in Baghdad were very worried when these confrontations with Moqtada Sadr, the invasion of Fallujah happened, it really did seem for a while like things were spinning out of control. That there was a general uprising and war in the entire country.

Over the last few weeks people are more hopeful, cautiously hopeful that there will be some sort of a political resolution. But the problem is that as long as we continue look at this as a military situation requiring military solutions, we’re going to keep getting into trouble again and again and again.

The US military is the greatest fighting force in the entire world. There is no doubt that they can tactically beat anybody they want to beat. But you can govern a country, you can’t win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people that way and you can’t create the sort of security people that need, the internal sense of security people need to want to engage themselves in the political process.

This is something that I don’t think George Bush or Paul Bremer really understand. They can say the future of Iraq is up to the Iraqi people. OK, you can say that, but you need to do things on the ground to prove you believe it.

What’s something they need to do on the ground to make people believe it?

Most of the people I know in Iraq believe the US will impose a government on them and they will then either have to accept it or fight it. That perception has to be changed. People have to believe that they are going to have a say in the future of their country, and if they do believe that, then they’ll be willing to do the things necessary to build democracy in their country, to establish that sort of contract between ordinary people and a government that’s necessary for a democracy.

And you don’t feel that message is getting across with the setting up of city advisory councils and district advisory councils?

On the local level yes, I’ll agree with you. On a local level people do believe they have the ability to participate in their communities and elect a neighborhood council and get reforms done. You are seeing people organize in that way. But on a national scale, no.

As an interim step, I think people would have been able to accept [the Iraqi Governing Council] if the other measures toward building democracy had been done. I mean, it’s been over a year since Saddam’s government fell and we still don’t have voter lists. Why? We still don’t have a plan for how to conduct elections. Why not? Why isn’t that something we began working on on Day 1? It doesn’t seem like that was the primary concern of the CPA or Paul Bremer. And if it had been their primary concern a year ago, I think we’d be in a much better place right now.

What would you have said the primary concern was then?

It seems the two primary concerns were securing the oil fields and US access to the oil, and de-Baathifying the entire country. And I think that was a mistake. I really do. The majority of people in the Baath Party were not supporters of Saddam Hussein. They were in it because it gave them advantages in society or because they were afraid not to be in it.

So here we are in mid-May with that all-important day, June 30, approaching. What would like to see happen to give some idea that there is progress?

June 30 is pretty much an arbitrary date. Rhetorically we put ourselves in a corner where we have to have something there. Here we are less than two months away from it and we don’t know what we’re turning sovereignty to, or what that sovereignty means.

We need to start seeing the Iraqi people as people and as our equals. And we need to start putting their concerns and their wishes at the top of whatever this list we’re making of things we need to get done in Iraq.

When we talk about security in Iraq, we mean attacks against Americans, or attacks against Iraqis working with the Americans. Iraqis consistently report that security is their primary concern... they’re talking about street crime, they’re talking about women getting kidnapped and raped, children getting kidnapped and held for ransom. They’re talking about thugs on the street who will rob you everything you have on you or carjack you, or break into your business. Until we can see that and understand that for Iraqis’ their primary concern isn’t whether US soldiers are getting shot at, but whether they’re getting shot at, and do something about that, we’re going to be in real trouble.

We need to do something about security. We need to do something about infrastructure. It’s been a year since the war and the electricity is not up. That’s ridiculous. Access to clean water and garbage collection, things that people take for granted here, and to some degree took for granted there under the dictatorship before, those things need to be restored.

And then we need to find a way to inculcate a sense among the Iraqis that they really will have control over the destiny of Iraq.

Did you have contact with Americans when you went back? What were they like and what were the doing?

I did. The US Army isn’t waiting for a bunch of peace activists to come and work with them to secure the future of Iraq. They’ve got their procedures and policies and chain of command and they’re going to follow that.

You know, it was interesting and sad to see the changes in attitudes among the American soldiers and among the Iraqis. In the beginning, right after the fall of government, a lot of the American soldiers I talked to were really very enthusiastic, very proud of what had happened, and really felt they were part of this pivotal moment in history—that they’d helped to liberate the people of Iraq. They felt an obligation to the Iraqis.

But as the months progressed, I think it became clearer there was no real plan for post-war Iraq, that nobody really knew what they were doing—military brass or people in Washington. And it also became clearer, as that sort of incompetence was showing itself to the Iraqis, the Iraqis became more and more disgusted and angry with the occupation soldiers.

There developed these walls, and this sort of tension between soldiers and Iraqis, and people began to associate with each other less and less. You’d see soldiers on the street but they weren’t talking to the Iraqis like before. It was really sad to see.

Would you say that’s from an erosion of trust?

Yes. Absolutely. It shows you what violence does to people. The fact is that Iraqis committing acts of violence against Americans are an extreme minority of the population, and if there are American soldiers who have similar attitudes, who hate Iraqis and want to hurt them, they are also an extreme minority among the soldiers.

So you have really small minorities who want to hurt each other, but their desire to do that, and the fact that they act on that desire on occasion, leads to incredible prejudice, and these walls that go up between two people who otherwise should be able to get along. It’s amazing what violence and fear does. It’s really sad. Until we recognize that, it’s going to be very hard to do right by the Iraqi people.

What was your first reaction when you saw the prison photos?

I wasn’t surprised. We’d been hearing stories from Iraqi detainees, the rumor mill on the street. We tend to disregard most of the rumors. A lot of them are over the top, and I’m don’t know that I would believe stories that American soldiers were witnessing rapes or sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners. I don’t know that I would have believed that.

But we did know that people were being unfairly detained, that they weren’t having access to their families or the Red Cross. So I wasn’t surprised [at that], but I was surprised that they took pictures of it.

The thing I find most troubling now is that it’s coming out more and more that they were ordered to take those pictures, that all these things were staged by people in military intelligence in order intimidate the other prisoners, to use it as a tool of interrogation, and that’s absolutely disgusting.

Can the US regain trust in the aftermath?

There wasn’t a whole lot of trust for the United States before these pictures came out. It confirms suspicions, and I think the lack of trust before was more out of this feeling that the Americans have their own agenda. But the pictures seem to reinforce the notion that the Americans are there to humiliate the Iraqis, that they’re there to hurt them. That’s much different and worse, and it’s hurt us quite a bit in Iraq.

So as one general during the invasion asked, how does this end?

I don’t know. I don’t have an answer to what the political solution should be. And I don’t think most Iraqis have an answer to what the political solution should be. But I do know the Iraqis are some of the strongest and most resourceful people I’ve ever met. They lived under 30 years of incredible dictatorship. They lived through three devastating wars. They lived through 13 years of sanctions. And they are still there.

What I am encouraging people to do as I go around the country and do talks is not to focus so much on the politics right now but to focus on building the connections between Americans, ordinary people here in the US, and ordinary people in Iraq, building friendships between the two countries, identifying groups in Iraq that we can support.

There are all kinds of people in Iraq who are coming together right now to take care of the elderly, to rebuild the country themselves. [We should] go ahead and identify those groups we can support, support the development of civil society in Iraq, something that wasn’t possible under Saddam. Maybe through those friendships, those connections, through that support we’ll begin to find a way to a political solution to the crisis.

Do you feel the invasion of Iraq has done anything to make the world safer from terrorism?

No, I think it’s made the world much more dangerous. Terrorism is not an ideology. It’s not a country. Terrorism is a delusion that there is no such thing as innocence in the world.

War is the greatest form of terrorism there is. It is the imposition of such massive deadly force so as to impose political solutions of one country on another. And I think that the rest of the world, particularly the Arab and Muslim world, looked at the war in Iraq and saw justification, very thin public justification, and saw civilian casualties, the civilian damage of war in a way that wasn’t shown here. I don’t think the pictures and stories of individual people suffering under war came through the American media. And it is something that was pushed in the Arab media.

When I look at the incompetence of this occupation, frankly I find it mind-boggling. I am an opponent of the Bush Administration’s policies in the Middle East…but even I was shocked by the sheer systemic incompetence of the handling of post-war Iraq.

Anything else you want to talk about that we didn’t cover?

I really do believe that nonviolence is something that people around the world increasingly have to start thinking about. To understand the power of it. Too often here in the United States and in other places, we confuse nonviolence with inaction, pacifism with passivity, and the two are not related.

It’s hard facing violence in the world, facing wars, facing dictatorships, to know how we can find nonviolent responses to violence. But it seems to me if we are going to have any hope of building a lasting peace, it’s going to come through nonviolent action. It’s going to come through finding ways of building connections between people all over the world, and creating actions that empower people, and make them feel that they are part of a community rather than the reactions that violence provokes, which are fear and prejudice and hatred and more violence.

Ramzi Kysia will speak at 6pm on May 17 in the University Center at Cal State-Monterey Bay. His presentation, which is free, is sponsored by Institute for Global Learning, the Global Studies Department.