War Causes Students to Take Critical Look at Beliefs : Colleges: The fighting in the gulf has many young people examining their ideas. For some, it is the first time they have faced this kind of intense soul-searching.

“Tragedy,” the late Robert Kennedy once said in a reference to the Vietnam War, “is a tool for the living to gain wisdom.”

But the tragedy of the Persian Gulf War to date has provided more questions than wisdom for many college students, and so several hundred students were drawn to teach-ins last week at two Glendale-area colleges, where professors, analysts and activists tried to help them digest the meaning of the crisis.

At Glendale Community College last Friday, Prof. Sally Dungan told students the war against Iraq is “the cost of justice” in the world, seeking mainly to strengthen the role of the United Nations in world politics.

Prof. Carlos Ugalde said it merely showcased what he said was the Bush Administration’s flawed and hypocritical foreign policy. Ugalde called on students to protest the war.

At Occidental College that day, Prof. Brice Harris and other speakers said they believed that Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait should be challenged--but through economic sanctions, not war.

“We see ourselves as fighting against this cruel and repressive aggressor,” Harris said. “What we need to understand is that many people around the world . . . think it’s the other way around.”

At both teach-ins, the predominant view among the speakers and students was opposition to the U.S. military action in the gulf. But only the speakers seemed adamant and decisive.

The answers to the dilemmas of the war did not seem as clear to many students who attended, but then, neither did the questions.

For some students--especially those who immigrated from the Middle East or other war-torn countries--the war has not been merely a kaleidoscope through which to study the complexities of the world. It also has been a mirror in which they have peered closely at themselves.

“There is a lot of soul-searching going on right now,” said Stephan Potchatek, a religion and philosophy major who organized Occidental’s teach-in. “This is probably the first time that most college students . . . have had to respond to these kinds of questions.”

“There’s not been a war, an American war, in the lives of these kids,” said Harris after he spoke to students. “They don’t remember Vietnam, they don’t remember the draft. It’s all a new world to them.”

Here is a look at how the war has intensified, and in some cases confused, the usual college-age self-examination of four students:

Last Friday, Pedro Gonzales, 20, took a break from his economics studies and his two jobs to attend the two-day teach-in at Glendale College.

Gonzales questioned many of the lecturers, more often searching for guidance than challenging their opinions. As a Guatemalan who came to Los Angeles five years ago, he has found it difficult, he said, to decide whether to support a war waged by a country that has given him the freedom to speak out against it.

“I consider myself to be right in the middle of whether the war is right or not. I just don’t know for sure,” said the soft-spoken Gonzales. “I think that this war is wrong because war is not the way to solve anything.

“But if I said this in Guatemala, my family might be shot,” he said. “If you say controversial things in Guatemala, you often risk your life and the lives of your family.”

Lydia, a biochemistry and premed major, stood outside Occidental’s teach-in last Friday, wearing a baseball cap, sweat pants and high-top basketball shoes, and tried to explain her dilemma.

The 20-year-old said she is a moderate Palestinian who is passionately opposed to the U.S. presence in the gulf. That presence, she said, is inviting Iraqi attacks against the Dhahran Air Base in Saudi Arabia--near which her father, mother and 11-year-old brother live.

“Dhahran was never meant for this. It is utopia. It is like Ventura, California,” said Lydia, who talked freely and emphatically but refused to give her last name or allow her picture to be taken, saying she feared hostility from U.S. authorities and Israeli radicals.

She last saw her family at Christmas. The fields on which she usually rode her motorcycle were covered with U.S. Army tents, she said. She and her parents, who are also Palestinians opposed to the U.S.-led war, offered dinner and the use of their showers to U.S. soldiers stationed near the base.

“You know the way they wear fanny packs in this country?” she asked Friday, nervously fingering a crucifix on a neck chain behind a Palestinian pendant. “That’s how my baby brother wears his gas mask. He can identify every type of plane that flies over our house. It’s warping his head.”

Lydia most recently talked to her family last Thursday night. She was at an anti-war protest in Westwood when she heard that Dhahran had been hit by Iraqi Scud missiles. She rushed to a pay phone and eventually got through to her family.

No bombs had reached Dhahran, they said. She wept.

Now, Lydia said, she is praying that the same troops to whom she delivered cookies and candy at Christmas, the same troops who she protested should leave the gulf, can protect her family.

“My blood and my family, my loyalty to my nationality and my loyalty to my family, are split down the middle,” she said. “I was brought up as a Palestinian. How can I support an occupation and at the same time fight an occupation?” she said, referring to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

“I’m studying to be a doctor. How can I ever support killing anywhere in the world?”

For Stephan Potchatek, the questions posed by war may not be as fearful--but are perhaps no less divisive.

Potchatek, 20, grew up in Santa Rosa, Calif., with little critical thought to world affairs and little exposure to Middle East culture or history, he said. Instead, he developed a passion for religion and theology and began considering the priesthood.

As the crisis escalated after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait last August, Potchatek became obsessed with learning about the Arab world and American foreign policy, he said. His hunger for education prompted him to organize the teach-in.

“I think we all have an obligation to learn about it,” said Potchatek, dressed neatly in a tie and slacks as he listened to speakers. “We should learn about the people over there, we should learn about their religions and culture, we should learn about what led up to this situation.”

But it was a specific question that he pondered most, he said, one that addressed his most deeply held principles: Can war ever be justified on religious grounds?

“The current crisis made me wonder whether I really supported my philosophy of nonviolence, of peaceful existence,” he said. “I’ve really been in a stage of soul-searching.

“I think now I’ve decided no, I don’t think any war, even a religious one, is justified,” he said. “And I don’t think I can support any government that wages one.”

Potchatek founded the Coalition of Students for Peace at Occidental. He also has asked for letters of appraisal from instructors and friends--a first step in applying for conscientious objector status, in case the draft is reinstituted, he said.

Shawn Emamjomeh, another Occidental student, is more concerned about being drafted into the Iranian Army than into the U.S. forces.

He, his mother and brother left Tehran in September, 1980, when Iraq invaded Iran. Now, the 21-year-old Occidental senior wants to return, to work for the Iranian government as a diplomacy expert with a moderate view. But he fears he will be detained and drafted for two years of mandatory duty.

“Personally I tend to not feel a loyalty to any country,” said the student at Occidental last Friday. “That is what my life has taught me.”

In his analysis of the Persian Gulf War, Emamjomeh said he is most comfortable detaching himself from the emotions of the crisis, divorcing himself from his upbringing under both Iranian and U.S. governments.

Hussein does not have a legitimate claim to Kuwait, and because nuclear weapons may be involved in the crisis, the United States and other countries have a right to intervene through diplomatic and economic means, he said. But their military presence is not justified--nor is their lack of understanding about Arab history or culture, which helped lead to the crisis, he said.

“I don’t believe in war, period,” he said. “But I think terrorism is a really legitimate act. It’s the only viable means with which these Arab nations can fight against the West.

“With a lot of those ideas, the Arabs would say I’m so Western . . . and yet here, I’m considered not so Western because of my ideals,” he said. “It’s like being stuck between a rock and a hard place.”

Despite his political conflicts, Emamjomeh said he is linked emotionally to the crisis--to Arab citizens, especially Iraqis.

“I feel the most for the Iraqi populace than anyone else right now,” he said. “I think they are the saddest case in this entire conflict.”