FINISH THE JOB

Ken Joseph opposed going to war against Saddam Hussein. he even went to Iraq to help do what he could to "stop the war" by serving as a "human shield." Then the soft-spoken minister got what he describes as a "stark dose of reality."

An Assyrian Christian, Joseph has relatives who lived in Iraq

during the regime of Saddam Hussein. His change of heart came after visiting them and finding that they wanted the war "to come as soon as possible so they could be freed from the nightmare." Joseph, a pastor, left Iraq when the U.N. personnel pulled out shortly before the commencement of hostilities. He returned with the first postwar relief truck.

Joseph is now seeking the return of lands and citizenship rights stripped away by the previous regime, and is working against forced "Islamization." His new fear is that Americans will leave Iraq before the job of reconstruction is complete.

Joseph is troubled by the behavior of relief agencies and Iraqi civilians who "demand services that were not that good even before the war." he says, "My heart breaks as I look into the exhausted eyes of the service members that have fought their way across the desert and now have to sit every day and listen to the complaints."