Clinton And The Rape Victim

A reader writes:

No offense, but you left yourself open to the dissent of the day when you failed to highlight the most damning piece of the Newsday article. It’s this one:

"’I have been informed that the complainant is emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and to engage in fantasizing,’ wrote Rodham, without referring to the source of that allegation. ‘I have also been informed that she has in the past made false accusations about persons, claiming they had attacked her body.’

"Dale Gibson, the investigator, doesn’t recall seeing evidence that the girl had fabricated previous attacks."

This is the Clinton behavior we’ve seen time and again: quite likely fabricated charges, so skillful so as to become impossible to completely disprove, which serve "the greater good" of whatever cause they’re using at the moment to burnish their credentials, experience, or legacy.

What’s disturbing about this article isn’t that Clinton mounted a vigorous case as a public defender. It’s that it appears she played fast and loose with the truth in order to satiate her manic desire to prove her "bulldog" toughness to other observers. You can mount a vigorous case, but you’re not supposed to conjure up the circumstances that allow you to make that defense. Lying to help yourself out during your first court assigned case is not an indispensable part of the country’s legal defense system.

What One Iraqi Thinks

A reader writes:

Like many people, including yourself, I’ve been asking myself the question of whether to withdraw from Iraq or stay there until some hoped-for peace is achieved after an indefinite number of more years and deaths.

The other day I met a young Iraqi doctor studying on my Master’s degree program. After some conversation about his life and his losses in the war, I described the uncertainty some Americans feel about what the best thing is to do at this point and asked him what he thought.  Until that point he had been very calm and matter-of-fact about describing his experiences, but this question obviously shocked him.  He regained his composure, laughed a little, and said, "you’ll excuse me, but I think your question has such an obvious answer."

He proceeded to explain that there was no more need for Americans to fear leaving a vacuum behind; that the opportunity to avert that had passed several years ago, and that Iran had long since filled the vacuum.  Now, he said (to paraphrase), U.S. troops staying in Iraq only prolonged the killing and pain.  As an obstetrician, he likened it to labor pains that would eventually cease, but first the foreign body, as it were, had to leave the host.

Naturally one man’s perspective shouldn’t be taken as "the answer", but I was struck by how little we hear of the opinions of Iraqis themselves on the matter of whether or not we should continue to occupy their country.  Efforts to illuminate their perspectives, whether through interviews, Iraqi editorials, or references to Iraqi blog posts are conspicuously absent from the discussion I’ve observed.  Perhaps it’s because it seems obvious to some that they’d want us to go, but still I don’t see why they would be excluded from the conversation.

While some argue there are greater issues at stake, I’m inclined to agree with my colleague that we may no longer be (if ever we were) able to influence them.

By the way, the Iraqi doctor also felt that Sen. Obama was the candidate most likely to get the U.S. out of Iraq and as such supported his campaign.