Iraq War

blahIn a year whose first enduring image was of the frenzied protests surrounding Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s September visit to Columbia, student activism has played a large and multifaceted role. From marches to campaign trips and from division to unity, students’ “extracurricular activities” set the tone for a whole campus.

There was no national protest on the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. The event that essentially took the place of a big march, The Winter Soldier organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War—a gathering of more than 200 veterans giving heart-wrenching testimony on the roots of civilian deaths and detainee abuse in official policy—was nearly ignored by the mass media. However, there are signs of a renewal.

Iraq was an ingenious experiment in colonial design: piece together the eastern flank of the defeated Ottoman Empire, import a Hashemite Arab to rule over a collection of tribes and cities, and preserve British and Western interests under the rule of a friendly local government.

WASHINGTON, D.C.— It wasn’t hard to pinpoint Lauren Kelly, BC ’11, for most of Saturday. On a clear, warm afternoon in the nation’s capital, Kelly was a self-described “fashion statement,” clad in a pair of wool-padded, bright yellow rain boots up to her knees. In a crowd of thousands, you could see Kelly from a quarter mile away.