EDITORIAL : THE NEW YORK TIMES, USA

Discord Among Allies

Many people were taken aback when France emerged as one of the most pugnacious advocates of military action in Libya, especially Americans who were accustomed to French criticism over Iraq and French foot-dragging over Afghanistan. Without President Nicolas Sarkozy’s early and constant pressure for a United Nations-endorsed no-flight zone, military intervention might have come too late to save Benghazi’s people from the murderous threats of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

Now, Mr. Sarkozy needs to step back and let NATO take the lead. After a phone conversation with President Obama on Tuesday, he seems ready to do so, but the details need to be finalized quickly. French efforts to appear the leader and prime coordinator of that intervention have needlessly strained relations with other participating countries. This is a time for the military coalition to come together, not to splinter. It is irresponsible that the command sequence was not decided before the military operation was launched.

Mr. Sarkozy had his reasons for taking such an aggressive stance on Libya. His government had badly bungled the peaceful democratic revolution in Tunisia by clinging to that country’s brutal and venal dictator. He saw Libya as a chance to recoup French prestige in North Africa, a region France has long considered important to its economy and security. And he jumped at the chance to look like a world leader in the run-up to next year’s hotly contested presidential election.

The Obama administration, meanwhile, was internally split and reluctant to take on military operations in a third Muslim nation while still deeply involved in Iraq and Afghanistan. So it was France who took the lead in recognizing the Libyan rebels and, with Britain, in drafting a United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing military actions to protect Libyan civilians.

Had France pushed less hard, pro-government forces might well have advanced further into the rebel-held city of Benghazi, where Colonel Qaddafi had sworn to show no mercy. That did quite a lot to enhance France’s image around the world.

But if Mr. Sarkozy wants to emerge from this crisis with his international standing still enhanced, the right thing to do is to step back and let a NATO-coordinated combination of the countries taking part in military operations assume command. That kind of hybrid approach has been used before when other countries joined NATO in military action, for example in Kosovo in the 1990s and in Afghanistan today. It is not perfect, but it is better than the alternatives, including France’s pet idea of a council of participating foreign ministers providing political direction while NATO confined itself to military execution. That’s a prescription for paralysis and discord, and possible defections from the coalition.

Italy, for example, is the nearest NATO nation to the Libyan battlefront and the European country with the greatest economic stake in the outcome. It has made clear that it prefers a NATO-led mission to a French-led one. So would Norway, which has refused to participate unless NATO is in charge. And NATO leadership might make for smoother coordination with Turkey, an important NATO member, which plans to send warships but avoid actual combat.

NATO leadership best serves American interests. The United States took the lead in knocking out Libyan air defenses. That made sense because it alone has the cruise missiles for the job. Now the Obama administration rightly wants to hand off military leadership to its NATO partners. Mr. Sarkozy would do himself, and the Libyan democratic cause he supports, a big favor by smoothing the path to NATO leadership.

Less Than Needed on the Euro

By the end of this week, European Union leaders hope to endorse their most far-reaching proposals to address the 15-month-old euro-zone crisis that has already forced two countries into onerous bailouts and now threatens several more. Individually, many of the proposals have merit. But, as a whole, the package falls well short of a durable, long-term solution.

The main problem, as ever, is a German chancellor more interested in pandering to her voters than leading them to a more enlightened view of national self-interest. Chancellor Angela Merkel and her center-right coalition seem oddly confident that Germany, Europe’s biggest exporter and the largest single creditor of Ireland’s banks, would not suffer gravely if the euro zone tanks.

The latest plan has already been tentatively endorsed by the 17 countries using the common currency. It seeks to better harmonize fiscal policies across the euro zone. Meanwhile, it makes more money available to the European Union’s temporary bailout fund (after 2013 this will give way to a permanent fund) and permits it to buy bonds directly from beleaguered governments. Lending only to governments makes sense because it focuses help on struggling countries, not investors who should have known what risks they were taking.

Euro-zone leaders also granted Greece a lower interest rate and longer repayment schedule on last year’s bailout money. That could help European lenders as well as Greek borrowers because it allows more scope for the economic growth Greece needs to reduce its debts. Unfortunately, it is probably not enough scope for Greece to recover without eventual debt rescheduling.

Regrettably, no similar concessions were extended to Ireland. Dublin has rightly refused to bow to European demands that the cost of relief would be an increase in its 12.5 percent corporate tax, the most successful element of its long-term growth strategy. Without relief, Ireland may be forced into debt rescheduling.

The Greek and Irish bailout deals wrongly put the full repayment burden on the hard-pressed taxpayers of these two countries, sparing the rich country creditors who made big profits lending to what they should have known were risky borrowers. Rightly, the new European proposals envision future debt rescheduling — but only for future private lending, not past loans or European Union guarantees. Unless fixed, this will dry up private lending to the Continent’s neediest economies.

The package now goes to this week’s summit meeting of all European Union leaders. It can be improved by extending relief to Ireland and refining the debt-rescheduling rules of the permanent bailout fund. That could be enough for another temporary respite, but not for a lasting solution.

Real Family Values

President Obama came to the right conclusion last month when he decided that the Defense of Marriage Act, which denies federal spousal benefits to married same-sex couples, is unconstitutional, and ended the government’s defense of the law in pending court cases. But that did not relieve Congress of its duty to renounce the bigotry behind the 1996 law and wipe it off the books.

More than 100 House Democrats, led by Jerrold Nadler of New York, John Conyers of Michigan and Barney Frank of Massachusetts, have introduced a bill calling for a repeal of the act. An identical repeal bill was offered in the Senate by Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Dianne Feinstein of California and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, all Democrats.

Getting the repeal bills through both chambers will not be easy. Republican leaders are continuing to pander and promote intolerance, declaring that they will step in for the administration to defend the act’s denial of equal protection in court either by formally intervening or filing an amicus brief using outside lawyers paid for by taxpayers. Mr. Leahy, who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, should schedule a hearing to call in couples to talk about the harm caused by the act to make clear that their marriages are deserving of full respect.

Republicans like to cast themselves as the protectors of “family values.” But that mantle properly belongs to President Obama and the Congressional Democrats committed to ending this atrocious law.

Denying same-sex couples and their families the significant savings of filing joint tax returns, Social Security survivor benefits, and about 1,130-plus other spousal benefits and protections granted other married couples is not a family-friendly policy. It is discrimination, plain and simple.

 William Stuntz

“The Collapse of American Criminal Justice” by William Stuntz, to be published this year, is the capstone to the career of one of the most influential legal scholars of the past generation. He died last week at 52.

The book argues that the rule of law has been replaced by the misrule of politics, with a one-way ratchet of ever-expanding criminal laws giving boundless discretion to police and prosecutors, leading to a system that wrongly punishes too many black men.
The solution is “a better brand of politics,” including more “local democracy” through jury decisions about who is guilty and how they should be punished and a broad revival of equal protection of the laws to end pervasive discrimination against the poor and minorities.
The book’s concern about justice and equality gives it a liberal cast, but Mr. Stuntz called himself a conservative Republican. His defiance of easy labeling on the left or right was unusual among scholars of crime and punishment. But it was eclipsed by his other anomalies.
The most dramatic was religion. As a Harvard Law School professor, it was his secondary field, Christianity, that most set him apart. It grew out of his faith as an Evangelical Christian, which led to what made him a rarity among legal thinkers: his unwillingness to see himself as special because of his intellectual prowess. “The Christian story is a story, not a theory or an argument,” he said, and others are made in the image of God, just as he was.
At Boston’s Park Street Church in 2009, in “testimony” about the cancer that would lead to his death, he explained his faith. He described how God remembers those who are suffering, longing for them to join Him when their time comes. “It sounds too good to be true,” he said, “and yet it is true.”
When he refuted legal orthodoxies in his quest to return mercy to criminal justice, literally redefining the field, he was living his faith. On many of America’s leading legal thinkers his influence was more profound. He reaffirmed for them the alliance between faith and reason and, finally, between knowledge and goodness.