A Real Lesson in War and Peace : Education: The Persian Gulf conflict is providing a unique case study for UC Irvine program.

If they had to pry themselves from TV and radio reports on the Persian Gulf War, at least the students in UC Irvine lecturer Tom Grant’s class could immerse themselves in real analysis of the most intense U.S. military conflict in their young lives.

Are we trying to kill Saddam Hussein or take over Iraq, one student wanted to know.

“Why we’re there (in the Persian Gulf) is to maintain a balance of power,” said Grant, who specializes in Third World military conflicts in UCI’s peace studies program. “It would be stupid to carve up Iraq. . . . We don’t want them to weaken totally.”

Another of the 60 or so students asked: “With the fifth-largest army in the world, what’s going to keep Iraq from doing it (invading another country) again?”

The answer may be the essence of Grant’s class on the theory and practice of war in this age.

“You’re not merely trying to win a war here,” the bearded, fast-spoken political scientist said. “The trick is manufacturing from the raw material of warfare a desirable political outcome. How to do that? That’s the critical question that remains to be answered.”

It was a deft segue to the course material at hand: one theorist’s analysis of how governments behave in times of conflict. This kind of deeper understanding--of what is happening in the Persian Gulf and in wars and revolutions past--is quintessential stuff for UC Irvine’s center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies.

And whether it is history professor Keith Nelson’s class, “Peace and War in the 20th Century,” courses on the arms race or the technology of arms and disarmament, the center’s rationale as summed up by Grant is simple: “If you want peace, you must study war so you have an understanding of conflicts and how they arise.”

Now, with funding for three “peace” chairs, newly won status as a university research facility, and plans to build a campus home and confer degrees, the center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies aims to become a national leader in the study of war and peace. Grant and others have been in demand as experts by Cable News Network and Southland television and radio stations since the Gulf War began.

“We are trying to build something here that will make a profound contribution by teaching students and also be a formidable and unique research institute,” said Nelson, the program’s director.

Although already popular with students, the program became even more so after the Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait.

Rashid Kassir, one of the most persistent questioners in Grant’s war theory class, is a political science major who plans to go to law school. He takes peace studies classes, even though he doesn’t need them for his major, “to have a better understanding of the world around us and how conflicts arise.”

Born in Lebanon, the 20-year-old junior has a deep interest in the Middle East, and the war class helps him to understand the events in the Persian Gulf.

“You see things in a different light,” Kassir said. “Knowing the mechanics behind war, you can figure out what the Iraqis are doing, and why and how they’re doing it.”

UCI’s Global Peace and Conflict Studies is affiliated with the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, also created in 1983, which some say was partly an effort to counterbalance the war-making efforts at UC’s nuclear research laboratories.

Still, UCI’s program is very much a home-grown entity. It arose from the mutual concerns of half a dozen or so professors who feared what appeared to them in the early 1980s to be the Reagan Administration’s slide back into the Cold War and the renewal of the arms race.

Some of its earliest members include neutrino discoverer Frederick Reines in physics; chemist F. Sherwood Rowland, who first theorized that the Earth’s protective ozone layer was disappearing; economics professor emeritus Julius Margolis, and chemist Franklin Long, who helped negotiate the 1963 nuclear weapons test ban treaty and co-founded the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

All but one UC campus--Riverside--now has programs in peace or strategic studies, according to Kathleen Archibald, coordinator of campus programs for the systemwide program.

The UCI group has distinguished itself for its exchange agreements with leading Soviet institutes and scholars. Irvine also is believed to be the only peace or strategic studies program among the 15 or so in the nation to have endowed peace chairs, which UCI hopes to fill with outstanding scholars this year.

The Irvine group also sponsors one of the most active speaker programs of any UC campus, offering weekly forums on issues. In addition, it hosts special forums such as a two-year series on terrorism and a recent talk with Nobel Prize-winning atomic physicist Hans Bethe, who helped develop the nuclear bomb as part of the Manhattan Project during World War II and was one of the leading voices opposing the Reagan Administration’s “Star Wars” program. All are open to the public, since outreach is a key goal.

Marvin Goldberger, director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University and former president of Caltech, said UCI offers one of the most far-reaching programs for undergraduates in the nation.

Elsewhere, peace programs often are aimed at graduate and postdoctoral students who are building on specialties in physics, atmospheric chemistry, psychology and engineering, among others. That is the case at Cornell University’s Peace Studies Program, one of the oldest such programs in the country, said its director, Richard Lebow, a noted political scientist who studies the history and psychology of conflict.

Lebow and Goldberger, although having to turn down appointments to UCI’s peace chairs for personal reasons, are enthusiastic about the Irvine program’s potential.

“They’ve already established a very good track record with their graduate students,” Lebow said.

By whatever name, studies of global conflict and cooperation are vital as the world moves into the 21st Century, these experts say. Simple advocacy of peace, whether from the ideological left or right, is not the idea at UCI or elsewhere, Lebow and others say.

“This is a field where, if you become identified as a liberal or conservative think tank, you really don’t belong in a university,” said Sidney D. Drell, director of Stanford University’s Linear Accelerator Center.

The Gulf War has faculty members and students alike riveted to this rare window on the political, economic, cultural and psychological elements of conflict.

“It’s a terrible thing, war, but this is a wonderful case study,” said Nelson, whose students are studying World War I.