A Thought on President Obama's Remarks
As Jack already noted, at President Obama's press conference today, the president stated that "we have succeeded on delivering a lot of campaign promises that we made. One where we’ve fallen short is closing Guantanamo. I wanted to close it sooner. We have missed that deadline. It’s not for lack of trying. It’s because the politics of it are difficult."
I think this is wrong.
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As Jack already noted, at President Obama's press conference today, the president stated that "we have succeeded on delivering a lot of campaign promises that we made. One where we’ve fallen short is closing Guantanamo. I wanted to close it sooner. We have missed that deadline. It’s not for lack of trying. It’s because the politics of it are difficult."
I think this is wrong. Or to be more precise, I think Obama's comment reflects a certain lack of awareness concerning where his Guantanamo policy went off the rails. The problem, in truth, was not a matter of speed of closure. And it was not ultimately that politics have interfered with the closure either--though that certainly happened. The problem was that the administration, and Obama himself, profoundly misconstrued from the beginning the nature of the project at hand.
To be fair, they were far from alone in this error. John McCain made substantially the same promise during the campaign, after all. Closing Guantanamo was a matter of consensus among a broad swath of the American political spectrum. Yet it was always the wrong project, one that made a fetish out of a particular detention facility, rather than focusing on reforming the substance of American detention policy and practice. It created a great debate over where we should detain people, rather than over whether and when we should detain those people and, if we should, then under what circumstances and for how long and with what sort of review and judicial process. And it made into a metric of our policy success such irrelevant questions as when the last person leaves a particular military base and shows up at another military base. While framed as change and a break with the past, the focus on Guantanamo's closure--by distracting from the hard questions that surround America's long-term detention policy--has paradoxically served to entrench the paralysis over detention that has afflicted this country for nine years.
Obama has at times seemed to understand that the real issue here is the substance of detention policy, not its venue. In his speech at the National Archives last May, he showed great understanding that the detention regime matters greatly. His comments today, however, showed no such sophistication; he regretted the delay in the closure, and he blamed it all on politics. And he left it at that.
I have no particular attachment to Guantanamo and would be happy to see it closed. But its closure should not be an end in itself. And it will be a very hollow accomplishment if it ever comes to pass and turns out to mean nothing more than moving an unaddressed policy problem to Illinois.
I think this is wrong. Or to be more precise, I think Obama's comment reflects a certain lack of awareness concerning where his Guantanamo policy went off the rails. The problem, in truth, was not a matter of speed of closure. And it was not ultimately that politics have interfered with the closure either--though that certainly happened. The problem was that the administration, and Obama himself, profoundly misconstrued from the beginning the nature of the project at hand.
To be fair, they were far from alone in this error. John McCain made substantially the same promise during the campaign, after all. Closing Guantanamo was a matter of consensus among a broad swath of the American political spectrum. Yet it was always the wrong project, one that made a fetish out of a particular detention facility, rather than focusing on reforming the substance of American detention policy and practice. It created a great debate over where we should detain people, rather than over whether and when we should detain those people and, if we should, then under what circumstances and for how long and with what sort of review and judicial process. And it made into a metric of our policy success such irrelevant questions as when the last person leaves a particular military base and shows up at another military base. While framed as change and a break with the past, the focus on Guantanamo's closure--by distracting from the hard questions that surround America's long-term detention policy--has paradoxically served to entrench the paralysis over detention that has afflicted this country for nine years.
Obama has at times seemed to understand that the real issue here is the substance of detention policy, not its venue. In his speech at the National Archives last May, he showed great understanding that the detention regime matters greatly. His comments today, however, showed no such sophistication; he regretted the delay in the closure, and he blamed it all on politics. And he left it at that.
I have no particular attachment to Guantanamo and would be happy to see it closed. But its closure should not be an end in itself. And it will be a very hollow accomplishment if it ever comes to pass and turns out to mean nothing more than moving an unaddressed policy problem to Illinois.
Benjamin Wittes is editor in chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of several books.
