By SCOTT CANON - The Kansas City Star
                  Date: 12/09/00 22:15

                  Kathy Kelly stresses that there is much more to Iraq than Saddam Hussein,
                  the despotic thug with a cockroach's instinct for survival.

                  Hussein is merely the strongman that Kelly contends blots out America's view
                  of 23 million people who have seen their country tumble from relative
                  affluence to a state of Third World poverty.

                  And Hussein, she argued Saturday evening, was far from alone in bearing the
                  responsibility for the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children from bombs and
                  starvation since the Gulf War almost 10 years ago.

                  Kelly said the United States and its sanction-inflicting allies needed to
                  recognize their role in hollowing out the supply cabinets in Iraqi hospitals,
                  making the country's electrical grid a flickering mess and transforming its
                  water and sewage systems into incubators for disease.

                  "That is biological warfare that we're waging against the Iraqi people," she
                  told about 35 persons at All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church near the
                  Country Club Plaza. Kelly is the founder of the Chicago-based Voices in the
                  Wilderness, a group dedicated to ending the sanctions. She has visited Iraq
                  more than a dozen times in the last decade. "The (Iraqi) children have paid the
                  price mercilessly for a government they can't control."

                  After her talk, she led her audience in a "funeral procession" to the J.C.
                  Nichols Fountain. The procession was devoted to Iraqi civilians hurt by allied
                  sanctions.

                  The United Nations sanctions barring Iraq from selling oil and other imports --
                  at least without specific and sometimes protracted review -- and preventing
                  other countries from doing business there came 10 years ago after the country
                  invaded Kuwait.

                  Those penalties have persisted because the country has repeatedly refused to
                  meet standards for weapons inspections and monitoring that was spelled out
                  in a U.N. resolution. There have been no weapons inspections for almost two
                  years and no sign that the Iraqis will allow them anytime soon.

                  Hussein, according to the U.S. State Department and others, has maintained
                  an iron grip on power while keeping his family and closest supporters in
                  relative comfort, even as poverty racks his country.

                  As recently as August, State Department officials said, "Hussein consciously
                  and intentionally chose to subject the Iraqi people to unnecessary hardship."
                  The United States has led the fight in the United Nations to keep sanctions in
                  place to weaken Hussein's regime and as leverage to stop him from
                  developing a cache of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

                  Yet Kelly -- a 47-year-old who has spent most of her adult life in various
                  forms of peace protests -- argued that the sanctions had failed. In the
                  process, she said, they have imposed immeasurable pain on the powerless
                  masses in the desert nation.

                  Her travels to Iraq include two trips covering nine weeks this year.

                  Most Americans know more about the Jon Benet Ramsey case than
                  understand their country's policy of sanctions and no-fly zones paralyzing
                  Iraq's economy, she said. When they do think of Iraq, she said, they tend to
                  recall only its detested leader.

                  "It's as if only one person lives in that whole country," she said. "It's far more
                  complicated."

                  To reach Scott Canon, national correspondent, call (816) 234-4754 or send
                  e-mail to scanon@kcstar.com