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With Friends Like These…

Complicating the campus rape narrative
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A reader of this blog, commenting on the Rolling Stone/UVA rape story, writes:

I agree there are many reasons to be skeptical here. I’m glad this story is being questioned.

That said, I do find it believable that the “friends” were more concerned about future frat party invites than helping Jackie. A personal experience that happened to me my first few months of college makes me believe this.

I was a very naive freshman going to her first college party- and I’d never been around alcohol before. I didn’t drink anything that night, but many of the people around me had a lot. One girl got incredibly drunk and a guy who wasn’t very drunk convinced her to go “watch a movie” in his room. I was too naive to understand what may have been happening here, so I didn’t do anything. When we went to leave the party with my friends, we went by that boy’s room to collect our friend- she was disheveled and extremely drunk, and her pants were down. I suspected she had been sexually assaulted.

Our group returned immediately to our dorm and an RA spotted the drunk girl as we walked in. The dorm staff called my friends and me separately into a room and asked us all exactly what we’d witnessed. Apparently their purpose was to figure out how much alcohol the girl had consumed to decide whether or not she needed to go to the ER. I naively told exactly what I’d seen that night, including the part about her disappearing to the boy’s room (so I didn’t know how much she had to drink during that time) and coming out with her pants down.

Apparently no one else said anything about the boy. My “friends” figured out that I’d told that part of the story and I was immediately shunned from the social group for “tattling” and “slut-shaming.” I’d intended no such thing- I was genuinely concerned about her wellbeing and naively thought that I was supposed to share exactly what I’d seen with the college officials. I didn’t know there was an unwritten code about reporting sexual assault.

Completely plausible — and completely frustrating. This reminds me of people in poor neighborhoods who complain about crime, but who also support the “don’t snitch” mentality. There is no way for authorities to discourage campus rape and punish campus rapists if those students who know something don’t say something.

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With Friends Like These

A decade after 9/11, Bin Laden is finally dead, but what has the War on Terror (lately rebranded as “overseas contingency operations”) accomplished? The American Interest editor Adam Garfinkle writes: If it turns out that Pakistan has been more part of the problem in tracking down bin Laden than part of the solution—if, in other […]

A decade after 9/11, Bin Laden is finally dead, but what has the War on Terror (lately rebranded as “overseas contingency operations”) accomplished? The American Interest editor Adam Garfinkle writes:

If it turns out that Pakistan has been more part of the problem in tracking down bin Laden than part of the solution—if, in other words, this has been part of Pakistan’s double game all along—then it reflects backward on a comment I made just days after 9/11. I was very struck by President Bush’s call for “moral clarity” just after the attacks. And my reply to this at the time was that moral clarity is all very nice, but in this case it would be very hard to achieve. In President Bush’s “us versus them” world, the world in which one was either for us or against us—reminding us old enough of John Foster Dulles’ similar locution—he apparently had not reckoned with the fact that the sources of the 9/11 attack came most proximately from three countries that we counted as allies: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan. It was Saudi Arabia that brewed the radical stew in its Wahhabi schools, Egypt whose repression helped produce and then push out Ayman Zawahiri and his cohorts into bin Laden’s arms, and Pakistan that had helped create the Taliban regime in its effort to keep its hand firmly on the collar of Afghan politics. Moral clarity is hard to achieve when three of your closest regional allies are in fact responsible for the problem you are trying to solve in the first place.

What do things look like now, 10 years out? We’ll see about Pakistan. As for Egypt, it is now in flux, true, but its army is still capable of brutal repression against Islamist opposition should the need for brutality arise, and it could have the same exportive effect in the future that it has had in the past. As for Saudi Arabia, if you look at Saudi textbooks a dozen years ago and look at them today, you will see that very little if anything is changed. The Saudis are still stirring the stew. So while bin Laden is dead, the contributions of these three so-called allies remain much too similar to what they were before 9/11.

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The United States has gone far out on a limb to allow Israel to win and for all this to happen. It has counted on Israel’s ability to do the job. It has been disappointed. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has provided unsteady and uncertain leadership. Foolishly relying on air power alone, he denied his generals […]

The United States has gone far out on a limb to allow Israel to win and for all this to happen. It has counted on Israel’s ability to do the job. It has been disappointed. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has provided unsteady and uncertain leadership. Foolishly relying on air power alone, he denied his generals the ground offensive they wanted, only to reverse himself later. He has allowed his war cabinet meetings to become fully public through the kind of leaks no serious wartime leadership would ever countenance. Divisive cabinet debates are broadcast to the world, as was Olmert’s own complaint that “I’m tired. I didn’t sleep at all last night” (Haaretz, July 28). Hardly the stuff to instill Churchillian confidence.

His search for victory on the cheap has jeopardized not just the Lebanon operation but America’s confidence in Israel as well. That confidence — and the relationship it reinforces — is as important to Israel’s survival as its own army. The tremulous Olmert seems not to have a clue. ~Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post

This article got my attention for two reasons.  First, it raised the possibility that Israel’s strategic value to the United States may not necessarily be so great and that it could be, in the present age, a real liability.  National interest might dictate a reassessment of the whole relationship and the latitude America gives Israel.  I doubt Krauthammer believes Israel to be a liability, and he is probably horrified at the prospect of any significant change in American policy towards Israel, but there is clearly the worry that other people in the country, and maybe in Washington, are beginning to see things that way–and it is no longer off-limits to talk about such things publicly. 

The second thing that caught my eye was the strident contempt Krauthammer had for Olmert.  It is becoming fashionable among supporters of the campaign, such as Bret Stephens earlier this week, to ridicule the Olmert government for missing opportunities and poor leadership, and there is certainly something to all of this (though I am critical of the Olmert government for having done as much as it has done, not for failing to do more!), but coming from someone who typically regards wartime criticism of American government leaders as vaguely treasonous this is more than a little surprising.  If he were talking about America, and you replace Olmert with Bush and Lebanon with Iraq, it is difficult to imagine such intense criticism of even so markedly incompetent an administration as Mr. Bush’s–certainly not this early in the war!  But with the Krauthammers of the world there is always the possibility of invoking Chamberlain clause: if you fight hesitantly or ineffectively, we will trash you and look for our Churchill in the backbenches. 

While we’re at it, let’s be clear about something else: if this were any other government than a Kadima government, whose peace policy Krauthammer and the neocons despise and whom they blame for the policy leading to these conflicts, the criticism would be a lot less intense.  Olmert broke with Likud and helped Sharon reduce that party to the insignificant status it now enjoys, and this has got to rankle the Stateside friends of Likud; as much as they lament Olmert’s incompetence, I think they are also relishing this chance to discredit and mock him.

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