Near the top of the list of intractable problems the Bush Administration has created, Iraq most notably among them, is Guantanamo. Jeffrey Toobin has a great piece in the New Yorker about the situation down in Cuba. It’s easy to call for the base to be shut down which, as Toobin notes, all three remaining presidential candidates have. But how to do it?
Quoting Gen. Thomas Hartmann of the Office of Military Commissions, Toobin points out that, because we are trying alleged war criminal during an ongoing (permanent?) war, even if a particular “defendant is acquitted, he need not be released; he can simply be returned to detainee status at Gauntanamo, to remain in custody until the end of the war on terror,” which I take to mean, well, forever.
More than any of his other annoying traits, this is singular defining and most frustrating aspect of this president. It's not just his insistence that defeats are actually victories, or his crap about how the mere act of being optimistic will somehow, magically solve any problem, from a sectarian war to a pending recession. It's the fact that he has an unusual knack for not only failing to solve many serious yet solvable problems (energy dependence, health care coverage), but also create the sorts of intractable problems that no battalion of policy wonks or blue-ribbon panels can possibly solve. He will and should be remembered not as The Decider, but the Destroyer: the most destructive president in our history.
--Tom Schaller
