Hell Breaking Loose

I share Bobby's skepticism "that the public actually is primed to explode with anger" should the Obama administration notify Congress that it intends to send high-level Taliban detainees now at Guantanamo to Qatar. I am less confident, however, that Congress is not primed to explode should such notification occur. The reason, to put it simply, is that transfers and releases have no political constituency in Congress, while opposition to them is all political gain for a great many members. The result is a tendency to stampede mindlessly towards opposition to transfers. This tendency will, I suspect, be accentuated in a situation in which the proposed transferees are senior leadership of enemy forces. To be clear: I'm not in principle opposed to transferring senior Taliban officials with the right guarantees as part of a negotiation process that officials believe holds real promise. But I do think it's likely to generate a political storm, for which the executive branch has to be prepared.