Friday, March 28, 2003 | 9:51 a.m.
A physicist, a counter-terrorism expert, a political scientist and a Marine's wife were among those who weighed in on the week-old war as a tense crowd of more than 100 traded sometimes heated comments during a three-hour discussion sponsored by the UNLV Peace Coalition on Thursday.
While most at the Moyer Student Union were against the war, there were nagging questions of what to do about it and what to do with Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein.
Roy Ogawa said he has a 10-year-old grandson and doesn't want him facing weapons of mass destruction in a future war.
"I haven't heard anybody talk about how to stop the war," he said. "All I hear is, 'I don't like it, I don't like it.' Protesting this war does very little."
Elissa Williams, whose husband is in the Marines, said very little of the criticism reaches the troops on the ground.
"They've got bullets whizzing by their heads and bombs dropping on them" Williams said. "My husband is over there so we can have the freedom to speak."
Joe Alvarado, an ex-Marine who served in the first Gulf War, said the troops are focused on what needs to be done.
"As a Marine, they don't care what everyone thinks back here. You join the military for the flag and what it stands for," he said.
Raymond David, an Iraqi attending the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said that his country did not need liberation from anything except the global trade restrictions that it has suffered under for 10 years.
"Iraq values sovereignty and self-determination," David said.
David alleged that U.S. troops are "being used as mercenaries for Zionist warlords."
Physics professor John Farley and political science associate professor Mehran Tamadonfar both said that Hussein, the target of U.S. firepower in the region, is a small cog in a wheel that includes a clash between global corporations and a multitude of Middle Eastern princes.
"What do you do about Saddam Hussein?" Tamadonfar asked. "Saddam is not an exception. Saddam is an example of many of them.
"Saddam is a good person to beat on because his neighbors don't like him," Tamadonfar, who has studied terrorism in the Middle East for 30 years, said.
The trouble is, Middle Eastern people have no proof that the United States can liberate them, he said. "Our closest allies in the Middle East are dictators," Tamadonfar said.
As for more terrorist attacks from the war in Iraq, Tamadonfar said there is no doubt terrorists are an ever-increasing threat as the U.S. continues the war there.
"I am very concerned with terrorism in the future," Tamadonfar said. "I am afraid it has a completely opposite effect when acts of terrorism are acts of people who do not have a legal way to express themselves."
Middle Eastern countries resent what the United States has done in the Gulf, he said. "Kuwait is not a country, it is a corporation," Tamadonfar said.
Logynn Madysen, a veteran of the first Gulf War, asked people to search for motives behind the current military action.
"It goes further than profits from oil," he said. "There will be more terrorism because of power wielded there."
Political science associate professor Barbara Brents said the war is much more complicated than the Bush administration or anti-war protesters have portrayed.
"To say this war is about oil is about as simple-minded as you can get," Brents said. In the long term, after the war is over, the Middle Eastern unrest may be solved by bringing those countries into the global market, she said.
Physicist Farley said the United State has taken an extremely ambitious and extremely dangerous approach in Iraq by going to war. If the U.S. can control the Persian Gulf's oil, Europe, Japan and China will feel threatened, he said.
"I don't know what is going to happen with the war, but politically and morally President Bush has already lost," Farley said.
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