Protesters ‘Encouraging Hussein,’ Retired General Tells UCI Forum : War views: Time for dissent is past, he says. Many seem torn over rightness of the U.S. role in the Mideast.

Anti-war protesters are “encouraging the enemy, encouraging Saddam Hussein,” a former commander of El Toro Marine Corps Air Station told a crowd of more than 350 people at UC Irvine on Wednesday night.

“I’m not saying we shouldn’t have dissent, but we should have talked about this before the war started,” retired Brig. Gen. David Shuter said to the jeers of the standing-room-only crowd of faculty, students and community members.

The right to protest stirred the most heated debate at an otherwise polite, wide-ranging discussion of the Persian Gulf War, how it is being fought, and its political consequences.

The three-hour forum was sponsored by UCI’s Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies, an interdisciplinary program aimed at exploring and exposing students to issues relating to peace and war. It is one of a series of forums offered by the peace studies group and was scheduled well before war broke out in the Persian Gulf on Jan. 16.

Speakers included Shuter; political scientists Caesar Sereseres, Mark Petracca and Tom Grant; National Public Radio’s national security correspondent Ian Masters; and Los Angeles Times national correspondent Robert Scheer, an adjunct professor at UCI.

Many who packed the campus lecture hall were students who seemed torn over the rightness of America’s role in the Gulf War. Within two hours of the first aerial bombardment of Iraq last week, UCI students launched a spontaneous campus rally.

Since then, hundreds haae joined in a series of peaceful anti-war rallies and even spawned a largely unsuccessful boycott of classes Tuesday. But with the exception of discussions in individual classes, Wednesday night’s forum was the first opportunity on campus for serious public discussion and debate about the war.

The speakers made individual points about how the war is being fought and what America’s goals in the Persian Gulf are.

Petracca questioned whether the United States is prepared to conserve energy and negotiate with Arabs in the Middle East when the war ends so that the U.S. military won’t have to return to play the role of policeman in a few years.

Grant said the public is just beginning to see how tough the aerial war is and how bloody a ground war will probably be.

“I hope I’m not right about this, but I think that we stand a better chance of winning the war than we do of winning the peace,” Grant said.

Sereseres said even the intensive bombing of Iraq is not likely to dissuade Iraqi soldiers from fighting.

“There’s no way to get out of this war at this point,” he said. “Is there room for negotiations? There probably is. But that decision belongs to only one man, Saddam Hussein.”

Scheer took issue with some speakers who dismissed as irrelevant concerns about the draft and the heavily minority, all-volunteer Army fighting in the gulf.

“I get the feeling that there’s sort of a sense out there that this is a career opportunity for some people, and the rest of us can be bystanders to this war,” he said.

Scheer said some of the speakers assume that there is a clear basis for U.S. intervention in the Middle East. “I don’t see it,” he said.

Despite all those issues, it was clear from each member of the audience who questioned the speakers that they valued their right to protest, whether they wanted to or not.

“Twenty years ago, the professors and generals, too, told us what to say and what not to say, and we didn’t listen to them during the Vietnam War,” said John Rowe, 45, a UCI English professor. “And we helped bring an end to that war sooner.”