Finally, our guards at Guantanamo Bay are getting the hang of showing "reverence and respect" toward that "fragile piece of delicate art" (military-speak for the Quran), and, wouldn't you know it, our politicians and pundits, from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel to Tom Friedman and Bill Kristol, are angling to put a lock on Gitmo.
Why? It's an "international embarrassment," says Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who should know. His colleague, Sen. Richard Durbin, (D-Ill.), is himself so internationally embarrassed that he compared the terrorist detainee facility to Nazi deaths camps, Communist gulags and Khmer Rouge killing fields.
And so what if closing Gitmo lets hundreds of jihadists out of their prison cages and into their terror cells? "Sure, a few may come back to haunt us," writes Friedman. But being haunted -- which presumably requires some additional number of American dead to do the haunting -- is apparently a risk worth taking in order to win the war.
I'm not talking about the so-called "war on terror." It seem there's been a change in focus. Islamic jihad is out. The war on "image" is in. And, according to the anti-Gitmo-nists, we're getting creamed. Go figure: "They" kill people over a soggy Quran, and "we" lose the image war -- and all over the world, according to Sen. Hagel. He thinks closing Guantanamo is the only way to win World Image War I. That's because closing the detention center would "give us a clean slate in the Muslim world," as Nancy Pelosi said, revealing an ignorance of history so vast and untamed that facts alone would perish there. Clean slate -- like on Sept. 10.
Projecting power is not the same thing as winning a popularity contest. Nor is winning a popularity contest the same thing as winning hearts and minds -- at home where it really counts, or abroad -- which seems to be another point of desperate confusion. But in our poll-driven age of celebrity worship, the popularity contest is becoming the preferred forum for geopolitics, a kind of "Survivor"-slash-"Who Wants to Be a Superpower?" reality show for world leaders. If this is the case, by all means go for that "clean slate" and close Gitmo. Miss Congeniality would do the same. But don't stop there.