One Size Serves All The People

OC Weekly's web site is clunky and confusing, and it's not the only one. It was evidently designed by someone at parental unit company Village Voice Media, since the New Times site in Phoenix (a sister paper to the Weekly that broke Sheriff Joe Arpaio's endorsement of Richard Nixon) uses the same template. Reminds me of MLB teams sharing the same basic web design, which is also appalling. You'd expect lefties, at least, to struggle against corporate conformity.

Among the early editors of the Valley of the Sun's venerable alternative rag was a family friend named Daniel Ben-Horin (shown here), referred to in a comment under this 2007 post. Ben-Horin and my mother, Jean Sharley Taylor, worked together at the Arizona Republic in the late 1960s until conservative publisher Eugene Pulliam, Dan Quayle's celebrated relation, pitched a series of fits over the paper's centerward drift during the Nixon era. Daniel was fired, and my mother quit when Pulliam fired her editor, J. Edward Murray, who'd balked when Pulliam requisitioned the front page for a pro-Nixon editorial.

Daniel later founded CompuMentor, a Bay Area organization that distributes software to non-profits. My mother and I moved to LA, where she went to work for the LA Times -- and I ended up going to work for Richard Nixon in San Clemente.

Egypt's Rainbow Revolution

Sumbul Ali-Karamali:

Those who insist on characterizing Egypt's electrifying protests of the last week as "an Islamic uprising" fail to notice the Egyptian Christians who are protesting alongside Muslims and other Egyptians in Tahrir Square. It's an amazing mosaic of Egyptians from all walks of life: women in black robes alongside young men drinking beer alongside Muslim Brotherhood members alongside secularists alongside professionals, and so on. As an American Muslim not of Egyptian descent, I find myself hoping that one of the results of this uprising will be solidarity between Egyptian Muslims and Egyptian Christians.

The Wages Of Peace

More from Ethan Bronner on why friendly relations with Egypt are so important to Israel:

Israel’s entire strategic outlook relies in some fashion on its three-decade peace with Egypt. Thanks to the treaty, its military has minimal presence on its southern border, freeing it up for actions to the east and north; about 40 percent of Israel’s natural gas is imported from Egypt; Egypt has been supportive and helpful in negotiating with the Palestinians; and Egypt has played a big role in stopping the smuggling of weapons and militants into Gaza, and in helping Israel in its blockade policy aimed at squeezing Hamas.

The Book On Throwing The Book At Clinton

As a GOP congressman from a Democratic-leaning district in the San Gabriel Valley, Jim Rogan essentially announced his retirement when he agreed to be one of the managers of President Clinton's impeachment trial before the U.S. Senate in January 1999. After Clinton was acquitted, the White House and DNC placed Jim's name at the top of their list of ripe targets in the 2000 election. He lost to Democrat Adam Schiff.

Think what you will about the impeachment. Jim thought of it an opportunity to do his duty even in the face of certain political doom. After serving in the Bush administration, Jim has settled into his work as a Superior Court judge while he and his gracious wife, Christine, and their two ebullient daughters (not to mention Sparky), have settled into life in Yorba Linda.

At Starbucks today, he told me his long-awaited second book, Catching Our Flag: Behind The Scenes Of A Presidential Impeachment, is about to be published. It's based on detailed notes he took of every meeting and conversation in which he participated as one of the 13 case managers. If there's a record for the fastest a Washington VIP has ever turned to his name in an index, my guess is that it will be broken by Sen. Lindsey Graham, the most nationally prominent of the 13 managers, on May 3, the pub date of Catching Our Flag.

Building Community, 1 Hollinger Box At A Time

At NixoNARA, historian Maarja Krusten reflects on her and others' efforts to build and nurture an on-line community for archival professionals. As for getting to know one another by talking about contentious issues, that sounds a little like church:

U.S. Archivist David Ferriero recently posted a link to a NARA reorganization effort which is aimed at creating "an open door culture, creating a safe environment for differing views." Not every history or records forum has those attributes. It takes hard work and good will and some sensitivity to those different from oneself to create such a forum. You may not fit in everywhere but it’s the same as making friends and working with colleagues in real life. By trial and error and gauging people and studying how they handle different situations, you can find the forum that fits you best. There’s no better way to get to know people than to talk to them about difficult issues of national import.

Democracy, Peace, And War

"The Economist" reminds us that Egypt's peace with Israel was the desire and work of Anwar e-Sadat, not the Egyptian people, so more Egyptian democracy will mean a harder line toward Israel. And then there's America's devotion to Israel, which the magazine's Lexington columnist chalks up to shared political values, sentimentality, and evangelical Christians hoping to accelerate the parousia. Put it all together, and:

Israeli fears of abandonment look unwarranted. America will be faithful. But it will have to pay a higher price for its fidelity in an Arab world whose leaders no longer dare to ignore the preferences of their people. The best way to escape this trap would be for America to win the Palestinians their state. In that event, Arabs in general might be willing to make a people’s peace with Israel. But it was hard enough to negotiate a compromise when the autocrats were in charge. Finding one the masses accept will be harder still.

If a post-Mubarak Egypt means Israel will have to give the Palestinians more, it may just as well decide to give nothing and wait for the next war.

More Than A U's Worth Of Difference

When the Soviet Union and China had their falling out in the 1960s, canny anti-communists such as Richard Nixon understood the potential advantages for the U.S. Those who insist that al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood are indistinguishable miss an analogous opportunity. But as this analysis by Daniel Byman suggests, it's never easy for Nixon to go to China:

If the Brotherhood joins in a transitional [Egyptian] government and does not fall prey to its more radical tendencies regarding Israel and Islamicizing Egyptian society (something U.S. policy should strive to accomplish), then the hardliners within its ranks will criticize it for selling out, offering al-Qaeda a means to woo them. But should the Brotherhood lose out in a power struggle or fall prey to repression from the army or a new regime, there will be a new generation of embittered young Islamists who may find al-Qaeda's more radical message more convincing than calls for renewed participation in a system that cheated them.

Pharoah Is Still In The Building

Jeffrey Goldberg on Egypt's next round of challenges.

The Next Mubarak Is In The House

Thanks to Br. Hugh for his link this morning.

Walk Like A Nixonian

During an animated lunchtime conversation about God and politics today, my Nixon buddy Hugh Hewitt graciously invited me to appear on his radio show to talk about what 37 would do about Egypt.

I demurred -- and then thought about it the rest of the afternoon.

It's hard to take leaders out of their eras and contexts. Nixon's lacked today's broadening intellectual and political consensus against Arab dictatorship. It's not that anybody ever loved it, but ready alternatives used to seem well out of reach. Remember that until the 1980s democracies were the exception to the rule, as scarce in Asia and Latin America as they are in the Middle East today.

Besides, during the Cold War there were worse devils than ordinary tin horns. Neocons and other fervent anti-communists, including Nixon, insisted on the moral distinction between authoritarian regimes such as Hosni Mubarak's and the totalitarianism emanating from Moscow and Beijing. If an imperfect regime like Egypt's joined us in the anti-Soviet coalition, it was golden. In Nixon's time, the U.S. Egypt policy would probably have added up to little more than assuming that Mubarak would do what was necessary to reestablish order or even goosing him to do so.

It wouldn't just be White House or State department realists encouraging tyrants to keep their jack boots polished. Even the media sometimes agreed. When I was performing counterjournalism for Nixon as his chief of staff in 1987, I tried to get Raymond Bonner and the New York Times to withdraw the false charge that Nixon had authorized Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos to declare martial law in 1972. The irony was that nobody would probably have looked askance if Nixon actually had done so. The Times itself had run an editorial portraying Marcos's move as an unfortunate but necessary means of restoring order amid acts of anti-regime terrorism.

With democracy now far more prevalent, an Obama-era Nixon would have less latitude to encourage an autocratic regime to maintain order in the face of a popular uprising -- not that Nixon would naturally side against the people. When it came to June 1989's doomed rising against the Chinese dictatorship, Nixon didn't hesitate to speak truth to power, the escalating importance of the Sino-U.S. relationship notwithstanding. After Tienanmen Square, the first Bush administration sent a secret delegation to Beijing that resulted in a photo of U.S. officials smiling and clinking glasses with the hardliners. Then Henry Kissinger was reported as telling paramount Chinese leader Deng Xiaopeng that a great power couldn't permit demonstrators to clog the center of its capital indefinitely without taking steps.

It fell to the disgraced former president to denounce the Chinese leaders to their faces (I was along), saying that U.S. differences with the Chinese over the crackdown -- in which hundreds and perhaps over a thousand had been killed -- were "huge and unbridgeable."

And yet a hypothetical 98-year-old Nixon probably wouldn't have been as quick as Obama to build a bridge to the crowds clogging Tahrir Square. His first concern would be geopolitics -- back in the day, the implications for the U.S.-Soviet relationship, in our day the struggle against militant Islamists. In this dimension, the 2011 Nixon would be a statesman out of time. The attacks of Sept. 11 notwithstanding, it's hard to believe he would've considered terrorism as comprehensive a threat to the United States as Soviet communism. But having perched restively on the sidelines when the Carter administration was equivocating in its support for the shah of Iran, Nixon would've taken pains to avoid saying anything that would make Mubarak's life more difficult.

In 1979, Nixon considered the shah's fall a lost battle in the Cold War. His worry today, as Obama's must be, would be the danger that Mubarak's successor would equivocate on Egypt's peace treaty with Israel. He'd scoff at Kai Bird and others who claim that a less friendly Egypt would increase the chances that Israel will make peace with the Palestinians. Since losing Egypt and Jordan could set the peace process back for a generation, Nixon would be dumbfounded by Obama critics who accuse him of favoring a regime that would be less friendly to U.S. interests, including Israel. If that happens, all is probably lost in his pursuit of the signature achievement of a Palestinian state.

Only after gauging the Egyptian revolution's strategic and regional implications would Nixon give in to the Wilsonian aspect of his nature and consider the interests of the Egyptian people. Even here, it's by no means certain that he would've considered popular democracy the ideal outcome, at least in the short term. The White House tapes reveal his archaic predilection for ranking the world's peoples and their readiness for political freedom. There's also the matter of Egyptians' simultaneous devotion to democracy as well as savage, medieval practices that are irreconcilable with it. One can imagine Nixon telling aides, "For God's sake, four out of five of them want to stone you for adultery and converting to Christianity. You really want to give them the vote right now?" Nixon would've wished Mubarak had done a better job for his people. But right now he'd be rooting for the next Mubarak.