The inane style over substance debate over closing Guantanamo prison - 25-May-2009 - Generational Dynamics

In President Obama's speech on Thursday, he gave the principle reasons for closing the Guantánamo prison:

"There is also no question that Guantánamo set back the moral authority that is America's strongest currency in the world. Instead of building a durable framework for the struggle against al Qaeda that drew upon our deeply held values and traditions, our government was defending positions that undermined the rule of law. In fact, part of the rationale for establishing Guantánamo in the first place was the misplaced notion that a prison there would be beyond the law -- a proposition that the Supreme Court soundly rejected. Meanwhile, instead of serving as a tool to counter terrorism, Guantánamo became a symbol that helped al Qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause. Indeed, the existence of Guantánamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained.

So the record is clear: Rather than keeping us safer, the prison at Guantánamo has weakened American national security. It is a rallying cry for our enemies. It sets back the willingness of our allies to work with us in fighting an enemy that operates in scores of countries. By any measure, the costs of keeping it open far exceed the complications involved in closing it. That's why I argued that it should be closed throughout my campaign, and that is why I ordered it closed within one year."

This is a complete misreading of what's going on in the world. Al-Qaeda has been successfully recruiting for almost 30 years. Al-Qaeda has had many successes, in the form of numerous terrorist attacks in countries around the world. It's these successes, especially the 9/11/2001 attack on New York City, that are the most powerful recruiting tools for Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda's problem, at least with respect to the US, is that it hasn't had a successful terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11.

The reason that Guantánamo is being used as a recruiting symbol by Islamist extremists is because they CHOSE to use it as a recruiting symbol. If it weren't for Guantánamo, then they would have chosen something else as a recruiting symbol.

The so-called "Danish cartoon controversy" has remained a powerful recruiting tool by Islamist extremists. It was just last month, that President Obama himself intervened in an EU dispute involving the Danish cartoon controversy.

Thus, the Danish cartoons will serve as recruiting tool for Islamist extremists as long as they want to use them. Islamists always have plenty of such tools to choose from. Judging from President Obama's speech, quoted above, Obama is completely oblivious to all of this.

Now let's assume that all the controversies are resolved, and Guantánamo is closed, after somehow convincing countries around the world to take them, and after tranferring a dozen or two of them to prisons in the US.

What would the Islamist extremists do? Would they say, "Gee, I'm so sad that we can't use Guantánamo as a recruiting symbol any more"?

Of course not. They would start using the US prisons as recruiting symbols. They would have their pick of which US prison or prisons they wish to use as recruiting symbols.

We would hear that "Muslim prisoners are worse off than they were at Guantánamo." We would hear, "Prison guards favor Christians over Muslims." We would have "humanitarian" groups around the world demanding to visit the terrorists in US prisons, so that they can make statements about inhumane treatment of Muslims in American prisoners.

If you believe that Guantánamo is a "recruiting tool" for terrorists, then you must also believe that US prisons would be similar "recruiting tools." Even worse, the US prisons may become recruiting tools for terrorists who would like target the prisons themselves for terrorist acts. A terrorist would find it much easier to target a US prison, than to overcome the physical barriers to targeting Guantánamo for a terrorist act.

So the closing of Guantánamo would not make any real difference, or may make things worse. It would be a victory of style over substance.

In fact, President Obama himself seemed to acknowledge that nothing was changing, when he said,

So they've changed their names from "terrorist detainees" to "prisoners of war."

President Obama has now been in office for over four months. Has anything of substance changed? I'm not aware of anything.

He's reserved the right to use "enhanced interrogation techniques" besides waterboarding, and there are many such techniques. He's reversed himself on releasing the prison photos that supposedly show Americans torturing Muslim prisoners. He's restored military tribunals, after previously saying that they must be eliminated. There are hints of delays in leaving Iraq.

President Obama claims that, "I'm guided by the facts, rather than ignoring them." He says that Bush did things for ideology, but he does things that work. He says that he's reaching decisions by deliberation, rather than by politics. He's being "pragmatic."

What we're now finding out that when President Bush did something, he was "evil" and "committing war crimes." When President Obama does exactly the same thing, he's being "pragmatic," because "it works."

But even the claim that "it works" cannot be supported, as the situation with Guantanamo illustrates. President Obama clearly believes that closing Guantanamo will remove it as an al-Qaeda "recruiting symbol," but it's apparently never even occurred to him that the new prison, holding Muslim "prisoners of war," would be a new "recruiting symbol," possibly more potent than Guantanamo.

During the campaign, and even after the election, Obama repeatedly stated that he would change the world when he took office on January 20.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, this belief based on the naďveté of a Generation-X President Obama believing that everything that Boomers do is full of crap, and that by doing the opposite, all the world's problems could be solved. I first wrote about this over two years ago in, "Barack Obama to Boomers: Drop dead!" Since then, I've frequently written about the nihilism of Gen-Xers, and how Gen-X contempt for the values and accomplishments of their predecessors leads to their own self-destruction.

Neil Howe and his partner, the late William A. Strauss, the founding fathers of generational theory, examined the patterns of generational archetypes over six centuries. Of all the generational groups, the people of the Nomad archetype (Generation-X in modern America, the Lost Generation during and after World War I) were the group that were always the most bitter and angry during their old age.

Strauss and Howe report that this happens without really explaining why, but you can see it coming in the current Gen-Xers. The contempt for everything that came before, and the willingness to destroy it, leads nowhere but the self-destruction of the Gen-Xer institutions themselves. The coming financial crisis and world war are going to be blamed on the Gen-Xers, not the Boomers, and it's the Gen-Xers, in their elderhood, who will realize, with bitterness, that they have no one to blame but themselves.

It's interesting to contrast President Bush with President Obama at the start of their administrations.

President Bush frequently said that prior to 9/11, he really didn't know what he was supposed to do as President. After 9/11, he knew that God wanted him to devote his Presidency to responding to 9/11. That ended up being the only major objective of his Administration.

By contrast, President Obama had many, many objectives. He frequently said that the world would change on January 21. His goal was to heal the world with his mere presence -- cure global warming, provide universal health care, close Guantanamo, leave Iraq in peace, bring a two-state solution to Palestinians and Israelis, beat the Taliban in Afghanistan, restore the stock market bubble, and dismantle President Bush's war against terror. Nothing was beyond his reach.

It's the utter absurdity of this program that makes it nihilistic. Almost nothing of this program will be accomplished. Instead, the only accomplishments will be to tear down the accomplishments of previous administrations.

Bush's undeniable accomplishment is that he implemented measures that prevented a new terrorist attack on American soil. Instead of regarding that as a remarkable achievement, to be praised and emulated, Obama and other Gen-Xers are treating it as "evil" and a "war crime." This is the major example today of Gen-X contempt for the accomplishments of the previous generation, and the willingness to destroy previous accomplishments for reasons of style and politics. Dismantling President Bush's war against terror will only make it harder for the US to survive in the coming crisis wars.

If this happens, it would be similar to carelessness among the Lost Generation that permitted the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to destroy most of America's Pacific fleet in 1941. This was the greatest military disaster in American history, and led many Americans to fear, and many Japanese to hope, that Japan would defeat the United States.

Sooner or later the tv drama series, "The Education of Barack Obama" is going to have an episode with a real disaster. It can't be predicted what that episode will be -- a stock market crash, a new terrorist attack on American soil, or a major military defeat overseas are possibilities -- but Generational Dynamics predicts that something like that is going to happen in this generational Crisis era. Nor can we predict how much it will cost the United States in terms of ability to survive the coming world war.

At that point, President Obama will learn that simple aphorisms and polyannish wishes have little or nothing to do with what happens in the real world.

Generational Dynamics Web Log for 25-May-2009
The inane style over substance debate over closing Guantanamo prison

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 25-May-2009 The inane style over substance debate over closing Guantanamo prison

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 25-May-2009
The inane style over substance debate over closing Guantanamo prison