It’s the anti-war protesters that seem to be getting all of the attention on college campuses. But here and there, and even in Morningside Heights, there are beginning to be some students who see the logic in liberating Iraq. The Columbia University group Students United for Victory formed after September 11, 2001. “Now is a time of great threat to our nation. War seems to be the only remaining way for us to protect ourselves,” Jennifer Thorpe, one of the organization’s members, told our Jacob Gershman. The group has previously tried to bring the Reserve Officers Training Corps back to Columbia.

What is remarkable is not that Columbia’s organization exists, or that others like it bring differing students together for a noble cause, but that so little attention is paid to the many American students who, for a variety of reasons, have come to the conclusion that President Bush’s war is necessary. And are prepared to stand up and be counted, even on a campus that employs an assistant professor, as the news wires were reporting that Columbia has done, who teaches that Israel is a “racist Jewish state” and calls for its destruction.

The press, for all sorts of reasons we understand, tends to focus on those like the player on the Manhattanville College basketball team who turned her back on the American flag during a pre-game national anthem. But it’s nice to be reminded now and again that there are a good many students who choose instead to salute the flag and who have taken the time to grasp the substance of the current crisis.