Guantánamo, Democrats and Roosting Chickens

Commenting on the Guantanamo Detention Center, then senator and now Vice President Joe Biden said on ABC's This Week.  "This has become the greatest propaganda tool that exists for recruiting of terrorists around the world, and it is unnecessary to be in that position.But the end result is, I think we should end up shutting it down."

In fact, promising to return America to the "moral high ground" in the war on terrorism, President Obama issued three executive orders which at least in theory, were supposed to show his differences from Bush'43 including one requiring that the Guantanamo Bay detention facility be closed within a year. The President said both as a candidate and in his inauguration address that the United States does not have "to continue with a false choice between our safety and our ideals."

Apparently Senate Majority Leader Reid has decided that the choice is not so false after all. Mr. Reid blocked funding to close the facility yesterday. According to Reid, "Guantanamo makes us less safe. However this is neither the time nor the bill to deal with this. Democrats under no circumstances will move forward without a comprehensive, responsible plan from the president. We will never allow terrorists to be released into the United States."

If this is not the time or the bill Mr. Reid, when is the right time? After another national security emergency after which Congress will act hastily to create legislation that will overreach? If this is not the bill, Mr. Leader, as a legislator, why have you not offered an alternative?

Is Mr. Reid suggesting that President Obama will allow for the release of terrorists in the United States thus making the country less safe? By extension, is he agreeing with Cheney that President Obama's election makes the country less safe? Or did the alleged terrorists at Guantanamo become more dangerous overnight? Or is this the crisis that Vice President Biden promised would test President Obama?

Sensing the political setback that will face the President and Democrats Reid said, "In looking at the position of the House that was more logical. "We have clearly said all along that we wanted a plan. We don't have a plan. And based on that, this is not the bill to deal with this." So why didn't Mr. Reid suggest that the President put in place a plan before signing the executive order to shut Guantanamo? Was Mr. Reid unaware that the President was going to close Guantanamo and that Congress would have to fund the closure until yesterday?

The answer is simple.

For all of its support of the "anti-war, rebranded humanitarian" view of America, the reality is that in a post 9-11 America, the Democratic party's discomfort with security and safety has come home to roost. The fact is that Speaker Pelosi is in a quagmire on what she knew about water boarding and when she knew it, her various and at times less than coherent explanations are an embarrasment to her and to her party. Democrats with their hands on the levers of power simply do not want to be seen as weak on security thus, they reason losing the levers of power.

As a candidate, President Obama was a vocal critic of the military tribunals at Guantanamo, saying, the trials of Guantanamo detainees were "too important to be held in a flawed military commission system." Yet as President, he has decided to continue with those tribunals albeit in a different format. In addition, the administration has reversed course on its previously announced decision to release photographs allegedly showing prisoner abuse.

On the question of safety and national security, the Democrats made political hay with Republicans during the campaign. Yet with the campaign over and governing in full swing, Democrats are struggling to match rhetoric with reality. They have not found their national security voice.

There is no doubt that national security is an important issue. The recent political decisions by Democrats seem to suggest that despite their pitched rhetorical balderdash, Democrats have yet to shape a policy that is different in substance than Bush, who they so roundly criticized. So, it seems that Democrats too have bought into the blanket notion that "conservative ideology" by definition equals American safety and national security.

The problem of course is that ideology whether liberal, conservative or otherwise does not equal sound policy. Moreover, the fundamental botheration with the approach to national security in America politics is an over reliance on scare tactics and blind ideology peddled by political mountebanks more interested in winning elections than in sound policy.

Finally, on the issue of national security, Democrats should focus on the rule of law rather than the rule of politics. This means that rather than truckle from national security challenges, they should knuckle down and catechize national security with all of its warts, without an obsequies allegiance to ideology.

When John F. Kennedy was ridiculed by the right for his plans to negotiate with communist countries, he rejected outright the idea that "we have only two choices: appeasement or war, suicide or surrender, humiliation or holocaust, to be either Red or dead."