I hope that Obama is deceitful, not dangerously foolish and ignorant

President Obama on Tuesday delivered himself of these words: “We will close Guantanamo prison, which has damaged our national security interests and has become a tremendous recruiting tool for al-Qaeda. In fact, that was an explicit rationale for the formation of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.”

Let us ignore the approaching passing of the timeline for the closing of the Guantanamo detention center that was trumpeted with fanfare by candidate Obama and made into a written order with great flourish immediately on his inauguration. Let us also ignore the President’s decision to suspend repatriation to Yemen of Yemenis detained at Guantanamo, a decision that will further delay the closure. Let us also ignore that any decision to place the Guantanamo detainees in the U.S. will run into the current Congressional ban on such transfers and the time required to prepare adequate facilities to house those detainees. Is Obama saying that he will keep the Guantanamo detention facility open even though he knows that such a course will endanger national security? Is he admitting to consciously endangering national security? Is he accusing Congress of doing so?

I hope that the President is simply attempting to mislead his listeners and does not give his own words any credence. If the President truly believes the implications of these words in their natural meaning, he is either a very dangerous man who needs to be impeached for intentionally endangering the nation, or he is even more foolish and inexperienced than his critics have made him out to be. Let us assume that there is a clearly identifiable group or affiliation of groups that constitutes “al Qaeda.” If the President is telling us that the closure of Guantanamo will eliminate an explicit basis for the existence of al Qaeda on the Arabian peninsula, he is woefully ignorant of how and why Islamist terrorists become what they are.

The alternative interpretation of his remarks, pushed by some liberals, is that Obama is just saying that Guantanamo is “a” reason for the existence of al Qaeda, not the only reason and not “the” cause. Further, liberals argue, Obama is only saying that al Qaeda uses Guantanamo as “a” (presumably successful) recruitment tool for other terrorists, which recruitment endangers our national security. Taking the liberal defense on its own terms, if Guantanamo is just “a” reason, then even taking away that reason will not cause al Qaeda to disappear, as other reasons for its success continue to exist. Therefore, closure of Guantanamo will do nothing to increase our safety. Obama’s premise is meaningless, and his conclusion does not follow.

The same argument would apply to the charge that Guantanamo endangers national security simply because al Qaeda uses it as “an” effective recruitment tool. Moreover, one should ask just how effective such a tool is, and how much of a difference it makes. Al Qaeda was recruiting followers and plotting long before Guantanamo housed a single terrorist. Bin Laden was using what he portrayed as American cowardice and weakness (as in Somalia in 1992 and 1993) and the American government’s fecklessness in dealing with the First World Trade Center bombers as ordinary criminals and in pursuing terrorists in a random and lackadaisical fashion. Bin Laden was also using the stationing of American forces on Saudi soil in the 1990s and the hyped-up grievances of fundamentalist Islam and of Arab nationalism against the West. He even used visions of establishing a renewed caliphate on lands claimed by Islam over the past 1400 years. These are the kinds of emotional buttons that cause true believers, religious or ideological, to blow themselves up, to chop off the heads of captives, and intentionally to kill innocent civilians in the hope of achieving immediate entry into a sensual paradise. Blow yourself up or get yourself killed because some other terrorists end up at Guantanamo? Not so much.

The inanity of Obama’s argument is illustrated quite nicely by considering this: Is there any evidence that, during World War II, FDR (or anyone else, for that matter) made the argument that Japanese Kamikaze pilots were driven to their suicide missions against the Americans because some of their brethren were held in American prisoner-of-war camps? Or even that these suicide bombings were caused because people of Japanese descent in the U.S. were placed in relocation camps? I’m not aware of even an academic making that argument. Instead, the Kamikaze were propelled, so to speak, by a quasi-religious devotion to their emperor and a fanatic belief in their duty to their cause.

But let us assume that everything we know about the motivations of true believers is false, and let us assume that bin Laden was lying when he said what his successful recruitment tools were well before Guantanamo was an issue, tools that remain available today. Even assuming that Guantanamo is a successful recruiting tool for al Qaeda, why would Obama believe for a minute that any alternative detention center would be a less successful tool?

Obama surely is not planning to release the detainees. He has said so. If he did, that would be the greatest recruitment tool for al Qaeda yet, reinforcing what bin Laden has said about American weakness and fecklessness. Arab culture, especially, respects strength. Act strong, and they may hate you; but they will still respect you and act accordingly. Act weak, and they despise and disrespect you. And they will act accordingly, with even greater determination and confidence in their success.

If Obama plans to house these detainees in the U.S., popular pressure will demand that it will be in some supermax-type facility. Whatever may be the eventual outcome of ACLU suits on behalf of terrorists about the conditions of their confinement, to the ignorant outside observer these prisons can be made to appear far worse than Guantanamo. Conditions at Guantanamo are far looser and more relaxed than they would be in a windowless, highly regimented supermax-type facility in the U.S. If prison conditions are the key to al Qaeda recruitment, the terrorists will have banner years as they contrast unfavorably the conditions at a concrete supermax facility in a dreary Illinois landscape with what will be pictured as the tropical gentility of their former abode at Guantanamo. Not even considering the other unwelcome results of closing Guantanamo detention center, will Obama and his liberal supporters then rail about how the prison facilities threaten national security because they will be used as al Qaeda propaganda tools?

I don’t think so, either. This has nothing to do with terrible conditions of confinement. By all reasonable accounts (incuding those of the detainees who insist on staying there rather than being returned, say, to Algeria or China), the conditions are better than tolerable. Nor does this have anything to do with protecting national security. Obama’s inclinations towards that end have always been suspect. His actions of alternately threatening intelligence operatives with investigation or prosecution for seeking information through interrogation and then blaming them when they do not act aggressively on information (the case of the crotchbomber), as well as initially wanting to release pictures of interrogations, in fact disclosing methods of interrogation, and numerous other dodgy steps do not allay those suspicions.

This is, pure and simple, an attempt to gain personal approval among that increasingly dangerous layer of a transnational elite that sees itself as “citizens of the world,” rather than of a country, and that revels in its shared values, many of which run deeply counter to democratic politics, republican institutions, and classic liberal values of individualism. This is the narrow social stratum with which Obama indentifies as a result of his elite prep school and post-secondary education, his work with elite foundations and government, his (brief) association with an elite law firm and his longer connection with an elite university. He has often been presented by his admirers as “president of the world,” an image he has helped to promote with his rhetoric and his Obama World Apology Tours. His wife’s campaign remarks that reflected such a disdain for the United States and his portrayal of himself as healer of the planet revealed in his own speeches adds to the image.

It is his standing among this transnational elite, particularly in the U.S. and Europe, that he hopes to burnish by closing Guantanamo, nothing more. If it takes deception and mischaracterization, so be it. If his remarks falsely boost a malevolent image of the U.S. among those who have no good inclinations towards the U.S. no matter what, that is a cost he is happily willing to impose on Americans. The closing of Guantanamo and his personal quest to do so, has to be seen within that framework, which is about the individual glory and standing of Obama, and to which a detached consideration of national security is simply irrelevant.