The Morning Line On Libya

David Brooks on the shortcomings and perils of making war by coalition. For instance:

Most wars are fought by nations — by people aroused not only by common interests but by common passions, moralities and group loyalties. Multilateral campaigns rarely, on the other hand, arouse people. They are organized by elites, and propelled by calculation, not patriotism. No one wants to die for the Arab League, the United Nations or some temporary coalition of the willing.

In the Libyan campaign, Qaddafi’s defenders will be fighting for land, home, God and country. The multinational force will be organized by an acronym and motivated by a calibrated calculus to achieve a humanitarian end.

Also from the New York Times this morning, we learn:

[T]he firepower of more than 130 Tomahawk cruise missiles and attacks by allied warplanes have not yet succeeded in accomplishing the more ambitious demands by the United States — repeated by President Obama in a letter to Congress on Monday — that Colonel Qaddafi withdraw his forces from embattled cities and cease all attacks against civilians.

As the days pass, let's remember what he said.

"Because The Night," Springsteen and Stipe

R.E.M.'s lead singer, performing with Springsteen and the E Street Band during the John Kerry campaign in 2004. The background here.

"It Happened Today," R.E.M.

Hat tip to the R.E.M. fans at "The Daily Dish" for this lyrical video. I'd noted the biblical reference in December. If Michael Stipe's not an Episcopalian, he should be.

Ernestine's Revenge

The proposed AT&T acquisition of T-Mobile will give it 42% of the wireless market, and more:

As part of their assessment, antitrust lawyers must determine whether the deal might undermine efforts to encourage broadband service competition between wireless and landline providers. AT&T and Verizon both control a major segment of the landline market, so by allowing them to dominate wireless services as well, the merger could effectively hurt competition for broadband delivery options.

You'd think the three New York Times reporters who wrote this post might've mentioned that we devoted a considerable amount of effort to breaking up AT&T in 1974-82.

Bless Me, But "Big Love" Ended Surprisingly

A regular visitor to St. John's is married to a bishop who retired several years from the Anglican church in Canada. When she was introduced in church Sunday morning, she said that she'd sometimes been called the "mama bishop." So I bent my head and asked for her blessing, which she graciously -- in the Christian sense of that adverb -- provided.

It wasn't an especially remarkable moment except for our denomination's adherence to the ancient tradition in which the act of sacramental blessing, along with the celebration of Holy Eucharist and the granting of absolution, is usually reserved to ordained people -- deacons, priests, and bishops. Even within the Holy Orders, the blessings usually flow from the top down. Deacons and priests in the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles are sometimes discomfited, if only briefly, when our bishop, J. Jon Bruno, asks us to reach up to his broad, 6'4"-tall forehead and bless him. The mama bishop on Sunday also looked a little surprised by my request, but she gave me a good one anyway. All of us baptized, after all, are priests of the most high God.

Something similar happened on Sunday evening, during the series-ending episode of HBO's "Big Love," the unlikely hit drama about a polygamist businessman and politician, Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton). He's just taken three rounds in the chest from an angry monogamist neighbor in front of his house in Salt Lake City. His three wives hover over him in horror, watching him die. He looks at his first wife, Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn), and says weakly, "I need your blessing." She hesitates, and then complies.

It was a moment of sheer beauty and the last thing I expected in this completely weirded-out show which started in 2006 as an broad parody of plural marriage and ended up witnessing for women's ordination and being a little squishy on polygamy.

Much of the tension in the fifth and final season resulted from Barb's discerning that she has the priesthood, which in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is reserved for men. Henrickson is following what he takes to be his destiny to advocate for "the principle," polygamy, by founding a polygamist LDS offshoot and getting himself elected to the Utah legislature to try to legalize plural marriage. Meanwhile Barb risks tearing her family apart by attending a Mormon-like church which, unlike her husband, recognizes the sacramental equality of women. Ultimately she doesn't join it, for the sake of the unity among her, Henrickson, and her two sister wives. By this time, we've been deftly manipulated into feeling relieved when she puts family about principle, even though it's a plural family, and we all know that polygamy is disgusting.

HBO also got us to root for Tony Soprano, the murdering narcissist. Appreciating the nobility "Big Love" drapes over Henrickson in its final reels doesn't mean viewers have been transformed into advocates of polygamy. But I did get the feeling that series creators Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer had on their agendas persuading us to be less judgmental about lifestyles we don't fully understand and more mindful of the way most denominations and faiths fail to empower women.

Late And Too Little

The new web site of the Center Formerly Known As Nixon is finally up. Suggestion to my former colleagues: You might at least make the (ugh!) new name bigger.

The Final War Of Watergate?

Historian Stanley Kutler wrote a book called The Wars Of Watergate. Has the final one come to an end at last? In a press release today, the Nixon library announced that its new Watergate gallery will be unveiled on March 31 at a ceremony attended by the archivist of the U.S., David S. Ferriero, his presidential libraries chief, Sharon Fawcett, and the library director and organizer of the exhibit, Cold War historian Tim Naftali. According to the release, here's what the public can expect:

The Watergate Gallery chronicles the events beginning in June 1971, with the Pentagon Papers leak and the formation of a clandestine White House group known as the Plumbers and ending with former President Richard Nixon’s public explanations of Watergate after he left office. Through documents, recordings, and oral histories, the Gallery addresses issues such as abuses of governmental power, secret Presidential taping, and the role of the three branches of government and the media in this constitutional crisis. The exhibition includes a timeline of Watergate events with eight interactive screens that draw from the White House tapes and 131 oral history interviews done by the Richard Nixon Library with key participants like G. Gordon Liddy, Bob Woodward and Charles Colson. The exhibit concludes with Watergate’s legislative legacy and an interactive resource center of documents, oral histories, excerpts from the White House tapes, and television coverage from the era.

The public first saw smoke from the battlefield in Yorba Linda last summer, when the New York Times revealed that the former Nixon White House operatives now controlling his foundation, including individuals involved in Watergate or Watergate-era activities, had gone to war against Naftali over the exhibit's contents. These ended up being no secret, since they were available on the library's web site. Among Naftali's interviews is one in which convicted perjurer Dwight Chapin (shown above) says that Nixon was present when chief of staff Bob Haldeman ordered him to set up a dirty tricks unit for Nixon's 1972 campaign.

As Nixon's chief of staff in the late 1980s, I oversaw the design and writing of the private Nixon library's exhibits, most of which are still on view in the federal library. But in the spring of 2007, as we prepared to give the keys to the feds, I authorized Naftali to remove the Watergate gallery which, while never successfully challenged on a factual basis, had outlived its usefulness as a museum exhibit principally because of its polemical tone. It was former U.S. archivist Allen Weinstein along with Sharon Fawcett who, at my suggestion, assigned Naftali to come up with a replacement -- a four-year-long struggle which, as details become known, history may well remember as the toughest, most thankless job ever undertaken by a public historian. Among other things, there will no doubt be lots to learn about the secret role of politics, influence, and money when it comes to curating the people's business.

Naftali (shown below with Nixon's last chief of staff, Kathy O'Connor) must be happy March 31 is coming. Nixon's former White House operatives obviously aren't. But it's a day that has to come before Nixon, at least, can get his richly deserved shot at redemption. It will help when the rest of his tapes are finally opened as well, since their periodic piecemeal openings always seem to push him a rung or two down in the public's estimation.

Still, in ten days, nearly 21 years after it opened, the Nixon library will finally be complete, a full account of what Nixon called his peaks and valleys featured in its museum, the rich story of his far-reaching, course-changing presidency in its archives.

It's about time. As 37 himself might have said, 465 months of Watergate is enough.

Exit The Valkyries And Richard Nixon

My two concerns about Libya, stated better by others. First, Jacob Heilbrunn on the roots of the Iraq and Libyan wars:

Contrary to popular opinion, the Iraq War was not simply the product of neoconservatives. It was also championed by liberal hawks. An alliance between the two factions propelled the debate forward. It was forged in Bosnia, welded together by Iraq, then seemed to fall apart as the liberal hawks went AWOL. Now the liberal hawks have returned with a vengeance....

[I]f the venture goes south, Obama knows squarely where to stick the blame. [Hillary] Clinton, [Samantha] Power, and [Susan] Rice have taken their biggest gamble. The liberal hawks and neocons may well have prepared a new foreign policy disaster should Libya devolve into tribal warfare. And so this is a crucible for the idea of humanitarian intervention. If it fails, the liberal hawks will return to ignominy. At least until the next crisis erupts.

And "HuffPo" on President Obama's poor consultation with Congress. I'd raise my hand on that one as well. I definitely feel insufficiently consulted with, principally because the U.S. hasn't mentioned one vital U.S. interest to explain its decision to go to war in Libya. Obama actually veered in the direction of rash overstatement when he said Friday that Qaddafi was a risk to "global peace and security." That reminds me of George W. Bush stressing WMD instead of his freedom agenda in justifying the Iraq war. For his turn, Obama used strategic rhetoric to justify a humanitarian war.

It's important to give worthy motives their due. Perhaps Obama really fears a Libyan genocide. He's mentioned Muammar Qaddafi's "no mercy" rhetoric at least twice. George Will said yesterday that we've intervened in a civil war in a tribal society we don't understand. Fair enough, but if President Clinton had intervened in Rwanda in 1994, Will probably would've said exactly the same thing, and we might have saved a few hundred thousand lives nonetheless. If Obama or anyone else has evidence that Libya is different than a hundred civil wars before it that didn't lead to genocide, we should see it.

In suggesting that Libya is just a bleeding heart war, like the Washington Post and New York Times before him, Heilbrunn can't resist stressing the divide between, in his estimation, the pro-war "Valkyries" and Obama's more cautious male advisers. The mama grizzlies, this line suggests, were more attuned than the male grouchies to the potential f0r massive civilian casualties.

But if you're afraid of a repeat of Rwanda, as the secretary of state and President Clinton reportedly were, then gender has nothing to do with it. Yet Heilbrunn and the other gender-fixated reporters and analysts seem to be suggesting that women are more likely to commit our volunteer forces out of the goodness of their hearts, even in situations where civilians are at risk but U.S. interests aren't. That's pretty much tantamount to saying women aren't ready to be president, which, I don't think, Heilbrunn and the others really mean.

Actually, I'd put this all down to lazy journalism and a lapse of good taste. Richard Nixon, Bob Haldeman, and Fred Malek were, I trust, the last to count Jews in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nobody would write anymore that a president's African-American advisers had lined up against his white ones. It's also time to stop categorizing presidential advisers by gender.

That shortcoming aside, Heilbrunn and others are providing essential commentary, rooted in principles of Nixonian pragmatism, at The National Interest, published by the Center Formerly Known As Nixon. The Nixon Center's experts did the same after Sept. 11 and during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

But today, the Nixon legacy is silent. "nixoncenter.org" is now inoperative. The web site of its blandeloquent successor, "The Center for the National Interest," though promised last week, is still nowhere to be found. There's also not a word on Libya from Nixon's foundation in Yorba Linda, now controlled by lower-echelon, non-policy Nixon-Haldeman operatives.

On March 10, James Joyner stuck up for the former Nixon Center's decision to throw its founder and namesake over the side. Joyner thinks Watergate and the bigoted comments on Nixon's tapes make it hard to operate a foreign policy center in his name.

I don't buy it. Without his name and personal endorsement, the Center wouldn't have attracted the funding and star power to get started in the first place. That was because Nixon was internationally acknowledged as a course changer, in the words of one top supporter, whose foreign policy principles, at once hard-nosed and enlightened, would have permanent salience in the post-Cold War world. As Joyner himself admits, Nixon was "a giant of American foreign policy [whose] vision looks all the better in hindsight, in a town where neoconservatives and liberal interventionists seem to see no affliction in the world that is not worthy of American military intervention."

Eerily, Joyner wrote that a little over a week before the Libyan war. We need Nixon's vision in foreign policy now more than ever. But his friends in Washington and Yorba Linda had other plans.

Take Qaddafi. Please.

A provocative analysis from one of the unidentified readers of "The Daily Dish":

The Arab League has played us well. Our intervention in Libya is the perfect distraction.

Now that we're enmeshed in Libya, we will have far less attention to pay to Saudi intervention in Bahrain, or to the regimes' responses to protests in Jordan, Syria and Yemen. And what easy marks we are. We find it impossible to sit on the sidelines as critical events unfold in other nations, and we are desperately afraid that the Middle East, and its oil, is slipping away from our control. Libya, with a madman for a tyrant, is an easy intervention target. Here, the Arab League seemed to say, do you need to make a stand for human rights in the Middle East? Take Libya. We all hate him anyway.

We are gullible beyond belief. Did Obama, Clinton, Cameron and Sarkozy ever stop to ask themselves who really benefits from our intervention in Libya? No, a bottomless stockpile of missiles combined with a sincere, if narcissistic, belief in ourselves as a "force for good" in the world, made us ripe for the con.

They Almost Stole The Show

Aidan and Ally were the ring bearer and flower girl at a wedding at which I officiated Saturday at St. John's.