As Rhode Island religious and peace groups organize for a September 25 anti-war demonstration, Americans who came to this country to avoid foreign wars have mixed feelings about President George W. Bush's call for an attack on Iraq.

The Rhode Island State Council of Churches, the American Muslim Dawah Association, the American Friends Service Committee, the Rhode Island Peace Mission, the Green Party of Rhode Island, and other groups have scheduled the rally for next Wednesday (September 25) at 5:30 p.m. at the State House.

"Going to war with Iraq is not going to serve any good purpose," says Greg Gerritt, one of the event's organizers and the Green candidate for mayor in Providence. "The beacon of democracy should not be starting a war based on a rumor [that Iraq is developing nuclear weapons]." There will be civilian casualties, Gerritt warns, and a US attack may increase violence in Palestine and other parts of the Arab world.

A war would also divert tax money from human needs, according to Rhode Island Peace Action. Using Senate Foreign Relations Committee estimates that a war may cost as much as $100 billion, the peace group calculates Rhode Island's share, if the US doesn't convince other nations to share the cost, at $276 million.

Past wars and civil strife have caused waves of new immigrants to settle here. Siwani, an ethnic Kurd who left Turkey due to the repression that followed the 1980 military coup, supports a war with Iraq as the only way to bring democracy and free speech to Iraq and its sizable Kurdish population. Declining to give his last name for fears of retaliation against relatives who remain in Turkey, he calls the proposed attack, "The action for Iraq, not against Iraq."

Although Saddam Hussein used poisonous gas on the minority Kurdish population during the Gulf War, Siwanti thinks a new war is worth the risk, especially if the Kurds have US-supplied gas masks.

Saah N'Tow, a leader of the Rhode Island Liberian community, disagrees. "I don't think war can solve any problems," he says. "It's simply the leaders trying to satisfy [their] egos." A war also sets the US up "for the disrespect, the hate from the rest of the world," says N'Tow, who fled Liberia in 1980 as civil war approached the capital of Monrovia. War will hurt Iraqi children, divide families, and weaken free speech, warns N'Tow. The US should work through the United Nations to solve problems, he suggests.

Joseph Le, executive director of the Socio Economic Center for Southeast Asians, takes a middle position, saying war should be a last resort. A low-ranking South Vietnamese military officer during the Vietnam War, Le came to the US in 1981. Before Iraq is attacked, Le cautions, the evidence must be clear that it is a threat. And once a war begins, military commanders, not politicians, should make battle decisions, he argues, adding, "Not like Vietnam, where many people died for nothing."

Issue Date: September 20 - 26, 2002