Her account of the Iraqi invasion highlights the aspect of war that policy makers, as well as the media and the public, tend to overlook. Her work with Voices of the Wilderness in Iraq aimed to alleviate the distress, through medical and humanitarian aid, imposed by the economic sanctions on the country. The careful attention she puts into depicting the emotional strain inflicted on every individual she has encountered, young and old, exposes the common face of humanity across civilizations. Kelly highlights this in the end of part one where she describes her stories with the Iraqi people as ‘interactions between very ordinary people, from Iraq and the US, who caught courage from one another during a time of war’.

The precision of Kelly’s description offers disturbing detail of the physical and mental conditions trapping the children and their families, and carefully communicates their wretchedness to an English-speaking audience. Apart from the poverty imposed by the economic sanctions, bombardments from Operation Desert Storm destroyed power grids, which in turn damaged the country’s medical facilities. Doctors she spoke to complained of not being able to maintain their equipment and store vaccinations in refrigerators because of constant power cuts. Even incubators for babies could not be maintained. To cope with this shortage, doctors often had to rotate whatever available equipment they had between their most severe cases.

In her view, the US government was practicing child sacrifice, something that Bush, in his war propaganda, accused Saddam of tolerating. As an American in Iraq, she speaks about feeling ashamed of her health and well-being, ‘ashamed to be so comfortably adjusted to the privileged life of a culture that, however blindly, practices child sacrifice’. As an organization with close ties to the conflict, they distanced themselves from ‘both President Bush and President Hussein, believing that neither side is blameless’. The main accomplishment of her reporting is distancing warfare from politics and bringing it down to the daily endeavors of the targeted population. ‘Month after month, the bullying went on, unchecked. The abuser hid in the muddle of hypocritical policies that no one involved really believed in’.

Back in the US, the Voices in the Wilderness organization received threats of incarceration for travelling to Iraq, and were accused of being supportive of the Saddam Hussein regime for staging anti-war demonstrations. A fine of $20,000 was issued to them for merely delivering medicine and toys to Iraq.

The third part of her book is an in-depth look into life in America’s female correctional facilities. Kelly was incarcerated for protesting against the School of the America’s army center. Apart from being in over-crowded cells with poor hygiene- she cites the absence of toilet paper in one instance- many of the women are victims of the war on drugs waged by the government. A number of her essays are dedicated to her inmates, in which they are each portrayed for their individuality and not as a collective group of criminals. Many of the ladies are mothers in anguish caused by the guilt of being away from their children. Some are even imprisoned unjustly, targeted by a drug war that victimizes the poor and vulnerable.

Two important conclusions can be drawn from her themes. The primary one is that the US driven UN sanctions caused a large number of unjustifiable deaths based only on a false allegation. While Iraq was never proven to be in possession of weapons of mass destruction, the US surely is. Kelly claims that if Americans had paid better attention to the images of Iraqi children, the sanctions would not have lasted as long as they did. Finally, her assessment of the prison system, with specific attention to the fragility of the inmates, demonstrates the importance of having facilities that reform and not de-humanize prisoners. After all, they will be released back into the world to have a second attempt at a normal life.