The Road to Baghdad

Protests against the war started long before the troops crossed the border.

On February 12, local poets, including several Harvard faculty members, organized anti-war readings as part of a national Poets Against War day.

The debate intensified in the days just before the war started. On March 13, several student groups, including HIPJ and the Harvard College Democrats, organized a protest in front of the Science Center. The roughly 350 participants listened to speeches by professors and students, who denounced President Bush’s hard-charging foreign policy. Bush made a speech on March 17, giving Saddam 48 hours to abdicate or face invasion. As the deadline neared, six experts gathered at Harvard’s ARCO Forum to discuss the war.

Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi dissident and director of Harvard’s Iraq Research and Documentation Project, said American soldiers would be embraced by the oppressed Iraqi populace.

Although there were some spontaneous outbursts welcoming American troops, widespread looting and lawlessness has poisoned relations between Iraqis and the occupying American troops in the last few months.

By March 21 the war was in full swing and the Iraqi people were not rising up against Saddam.

That evening’s fierce air strikes, hinted at by Washington as likely to induce “shock and awe,” were the war’s most intense yet. Over a thousand bombs were dropped.

When students returned from spring break on March 31, little of the spirited activism of the opening of the war remained.

The Harvard Republican Club (HRC) began tabling outside the Science Center the Monday after spring break and distributed 800 American flag pins over the course of the week.

HRC also participated in a rally on April 5 in Boston Common to support the troops.

Most of the subsequent war-related events on campus were held at the initiative of faculty members.

U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General Tad Oelstrom, who directs the KSG’s national security program, hinted during a panel discussion April 2 that Iraq was only a small part of a much larger American plan.

“Iraq is more of a short term piece of a much, much longer run of war on terrorism,” Oelstrom said.

The next day, U.S. troops reached the Baghdad International Airport, only a few miles from the city center.