Seriously? BHL?

Say what you will about France, but their public intellectuals can get things done. This is so weird: philosopher/celebrity Bernard-Henri Lévy claims that he's the one responsible for convincing the French government to intervene in Libya, and that he did this by wandering into Libya to meet with rebel leaders to help them call up Sarkozy. I don't know how I missed this story, but I'm glad Ross Douthat referenced it in his latest blog post:

It is an extraordinary tale, about which neither the Élysée Palace nor the Foreign Ministry wished to comment, other than quietly urging a grain of salt. Mr. Lévy was in Egypt at the tail end of the Tahrir Square uprising, went to the Libyan border but had pressing business in Paris. But on Feb. 27, before returning to North Africa, he called Mr. Sarkozy, asking if he was interested in making contact with the rebels. He was, so Mr. Lévy rented a plane and flew to Marsa Matrouh, the Egyptian airport closest to Libya.

Accompanied by his oldest friend and longtime collaborator, Gilles Hertzog, and, of course, a photographer, Marc Roussel, Mr. Lévy walked across the border past hundreds of yards of refugees and foreign workers and flagged down a car, which was delivering vegetables every 20 miles on the way to Tobruk, the first Libyan city inside the border. He then went to Bayda, where he found Mustafa Mohammed Abdul Jalil, the former Libyan minister of justice and leader of the Interim Transitional National Council.