SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA AND THE PERSIAN GULF CRISIS : Pro-, Anti-Iraq Views Debated at Chapman : A Kuwaiti says his country is being raped, but a Saudi contends that Kuwait waged economic war against Baghdad.

Late last summer, Abdul Majeed Al-Shatti, the editor of a Kuwaiti university science magazine, was visiting in the United States and awaiting word from his sister, who was about to deliver her first child.

Then came the Aug. 2 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

Al-Shatti has heard nothing from his sister or his parents since, he said. He has learned, though, that two cousins and two friends have been executed.

“Today, Kuwait is being raped and dismantled, and its population is being replaced,” Al-Shatti told an audience of several hundred students and faculty members at Chapman College Tuesday night.

Al-Shatti, speaking at a forum entitled “On the Brink of War: U.S. Policy Toward the Middle East,” was on a five-member panel offering a wide range of views on the Middle East. The panel included U.S. Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove) and a Saudi Arabian social scientist who supports Iraq’s invasion.

Al-Shatti, slight, bespectacled and soft-spoken, talked of atrocities that he said have been committed by the Iraqis.

“Iraq has one of the worst human rights records in the world,” he declared. “Execution is the norm when it comes to dealing with their military or political opponents regardless of sex or age.”

Offering a sharply contrasting view, Yousif Al-Yousif, a Saudi Arabian whose analysis of the Persian Gulf crisis recently appeared in a Baghdad University journal, defended Iraq’s actions.

Al-Yousif charged that Kuwait had waged “economic war” against Iraq by overproducing oil and undercutting its price on the world market. Al-Yousif also claimed that many Kuwaitis had long wanted their country to become part of Iraq.

Dornan dismissed the suggestion that Kuwaiti citizens supported the takeover, saying the country “was swallowed whole in a matter of hours.”

Dornan said he was “mystified” by the American public’s ambivalence over the U.S.’s escalating commitment of troops to the Middle East. Dornan said that if unchecked, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would have upset the world economic order.

“Fifty percent of the world’s oil could have been in the hands of Iraq if Saddam had pressed on,” Dornan said. “This would have turned the world upside down.”

Dornan said the economic blockade against Iraq is proving successful and reiterated his support of President Bush’s decision earlier this month to double the number of U.S. troops in the Middle East.