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To go to war without wider international support, Alonso said, demonstrates an American arrogance that Alonso said she's seen in travel abroad. "I'm proud to be an American and when I travel I'm very proud to say I'm American. But I've also traveled and been very ashamed when I see how Americans behave abroad. I lived abroad for about three months in Mexico and was just ashamed to listen to some of these Americans who were just so arrogant and would look down at people as if they were nothing."

'Generations will suffer'

Kay Shishani, MSN, RN, is a doctoral student from Jordan who is advancing her women's health career at the University of Pittsburgh. She is 36, the mother of four children, and Muslim.

"You know they sometimes try to portray this as religion against religion," Shishani said. "I think it's not something that has to do with religion in any means. The Muslim leaders themselves say we should not be looking at this as religion against religion because all religions, no matter what, they are all about peace, about tolerance and teaching people about living with each other.

"Make our differences a strength point, not something where we say, 'Oh you are this, you are that. We are different, so I don't respect you, I don't even recognize you.' No, no, that's not right.

"You know, sometimes I ask myself, 'Who is Saddam Hussein?' " Shishani said. "We know this is the leader of Iraq, but we don't know much [about] who is this person. I don't care what happens to him."

What she cares about is that war will rekindle and prolong the medical fallout begun in the 1991 war. "Generations and generations will go through the suffering. It needs hundreds of years to get over it. We are seeing kids-I'm talking about thousands of kids-born with leukemia, with congenital abnormalities" as a result of Desert Storm, she said.

For that reason, "I hope that they try to get a peaceful solution."

Shishani said she follows the Middle East situation closely in the United States and world media.

"The good thing in the Middle East is that people understand what is going on here and that people are supporting a peaceful resolution," she said. Americans who support continued diplomacy understand that, like herself, "there are people in Jordan and Iraq, people who have families, who like to live their lives peacefully, who want to have a future plan and not just be serious in life, but to also have fun.

"It's not just Iraq that will be involved in this if something happens, God forbid," Shishani said. "The whole area will be affected in terms of people who will be killed and in terms of the economy. I like to think this way: I have a family, four kids. We are going back home this summer, and you know this is their future and other kids' future."

'There will be thousands who don't get basic support'

Richard Garfield, ADRN, is the Bendixon Professor of Clinical International Medicine at Columbia University in New York. At age 49, he has a degree in epidemiology and teaches community health and research methods to graduate and doctoral students in Columbia's School of Nursing.

"I think we are going to war. That is what is going to happen. There will be a military engagement and a defeat of the army of Iraq. And there will be an occupation force led by the U.S. military for an undefined, but extended period of time. If that's not what happens, then I don't know anything," said Garfield, who returned from the Persian Gulf the last week of February. There, he advised some of the 35 nongovernmental organizations that have set up in Amman, Jordan, to assist Iraqi civilians in the aftermath of a war.

"I've made a specialty of assessing humanitarian conditions in countries with economic crises or wars," Garfield said. He has documented conditions under United Nations economic sanctions in Cuba, Haiti, Liberia, Yugoslavia and, since 1996, Iraq, both independently and for the World Health Organization and United Nations Children's Fund.

As far as what U.S. policy regarding Iraq should be, Garfield said that is not for him to say. He adopts a position along the lines of the International Red Cross, which he said doesn't decide who is right and wrong in a conflict, but instead tries to identify ways to reduce the number of people who are harmed and help victims.