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Fadi Kandarian, who was born in Abu Dhabi and moved to the United States in 2001, sees hope for d

President Bush has said that the 2,000 U.S. troops who have died in Iraq did so in pursuit of a worthy cause – to bring democracy to the Iraqi people.

From halfway around the globe, Iraqi students at UCLA have had mixed feelings about this cause as they watched the coverage of the war, the mounting number of casualties and the beginning of a democratic government with the writing and passing of the Iraqi constitution earlier this month.

Though they expressed doubts about the underlying goals of the constitution and the means by which democracy is being achieved – namely through war and by the action of an outside power – students described the writing of the constitution as a milestone, something solid to show after more than two years of war and thousands of deaths, both Iraqi and American.

“It’s definitely a landmark ... Me and my friends here are very excited about this,” said Inas Ali, a fourth-year biological chemistry student who was born in Iraq.

The last two and a half years of fighting in Iraq may have hit closer to home for Ali than for most other students. She was in Iraq during the Gulf War and remembers what it was like to be in a war-torn city.

“For the Gulf War, I saw the bombings. I was there, I was hiding, I was trying to escape, trying to survive with my family,” she said.

She also saw the impact Saddam Hussein had on the Iraqi people, and along with some other Iraqi students, supported his removal.

At the same time, her firsthand experiences in Iraq give her a better idea of the realities of the situation that exists today.

“I’m torn because I saw what the Saddam regime did for the people and the way it mistreated the country,” she said. “It wasn’t good, but this war isn’t good either.”

Some believe that the U.S. will need to stay in Iraq for some time, perhaps months or even years past the marker of the 2,000th American casualty, for democratization to be complete,

Fadi Kandarian, a fifth-year molecular, cellular and developmental biology student, was born in Abu Dhabi and identifies himself as Iraqi. He expects that the situation would revert to chaos if the United States were to withdraw from Iraq before a solid democracy is in place.

“It’s not a war I support ... (but) I don’t think that America should leave before establishing a government,” he said.

There is much left to smooth out before the United States establishes a stable government to leave behind in Iraq. Mohammad Tajsar, a second-year English student, pointed to issues such as security and the broader divisions between different groups of people in Iraq as problems that must be solved before stability will be possible.

“The constitution is not ... going to pull everyone together,” he said.

Tajsar looks at the war in Iraq and the move toward setting up a democracy in the country from two cultural positions – born in Iran to Iraqi parents and now a U.S. citizen, Tajsar said he is as connected to Iraq as he is to the United States.

Even after the passing of the constitution, he said there is still much more to do.

“(The Iraqi constitution) is just one of the many things that need to happen before this country can call itself a sovereign democratic nation,” he said.

Some Iraqi students at UCLA question whether the benefit of the Iraqi people was the primary goal of the institution of democracy and if the problems with Hussein’s regime could have been approached by other means than war.

Kandarian said his primary concern about the new Iraqi constitution was that it was not written for Iraq.

“My main worry is that ... there was pressure on the Iraqi people to write a constitution to gear to the needs of others, not necessarily the Iraqi people,” he said.