Impotent EU scapegoats Gitmo

Victor Davis Hanson:

When President Bush arrived in Vienna last week, protestors bore "World's No. 1 Terrorist" signs while chanting "We will, we will fight Bush." A Harris Poll conducted prior to the president's visit revealed that the European public thinks America is a greater global threat than either North Korea or Iran.

Apparently, our terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay is the most recent open sore. When, European ministers have been persisting, will the United States close down this Neanderthal embarrassment to liberal Western values?

This European anger, however, doesn't seem to be based on evidence of systematic American abuse. Despite Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin's claim that Guantanamo was akin to Nazi camps, the few reported regrettable, isolated cases of sleep deprivation and harassment seem no worse than what we read about in most prisons. The roughly 450 prisoners still there - many of them killers - are probably treated as well as inmates in either Europe or the U.S.

Further, Guantanamo exists to fill a vacuum in an undeclared and unprecedented postmodern war of few good choices in which the enemy does not wear uniforms, adhere to the Geneva Convention or distinguish civilians from soldiers.

If the U.S. were to close down Guantanamo and send the detainees back to their home countries, some returnees would be freed and treated as heroes - and then rejoin the global jihad. Other released terrorists, or so the Europeans no doubt would whine, might be executed by the autocratic Middle Eastern governments in their homelands that are as afraid of Islamic terrorists as we are.

So, should we instead try all of the Guantanamo detainees inside the U.S.?

No. By doing that, we would be inviting thousands of lawyers and public defenders to argue, on behalf of their clients, that we are not in a real war but simply prosecuting common criminals. Numerous trials and appeals as costly and circus-like as the drawn-out spectacle of Zacarias Moussaoui (the so-called 20th hijacker) would likely follow. And, in the end, Europeans would still object, since the U.S. would be exposing foreign nationals to possible death-penalty sentences.

The real problem is that Guantanamo Bay, like Bush himself, has become a symbol of sorts. It is an easy scapegoat through which Europeans can vent their much larger love-hate frustrations with their protector and rival, the hyper-power America.

The pacifism of the European Union was supposed to be a post-Cold War model of liberal reason for the rest of the world. Instead, Islamic fascists have either ignored Europe's human-rights advocacy or considered it a sign of weakness to be exploited. An impotent E.U. is embarrassed and needs cheap targets like Guantanamo to transfer attention away from its past naivete about the dangers of Islamic fascism.

By ankle-biting America on Guantanamo, the Europeans sound moral and tough while ignoring the real dangers for which they have absolutely no solutions - unassimilated and angry Muslims, the Dutch and Danes under assault by radical Islamic censors and a defenseless Europe potentially soon in range of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's nuclear-tipped missiles.

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There is more. The Euros and the liberals are just flat wrong about Gitmo. It is mostly because of their failed lawfare model for fighting terrorism. But if you followed the lawfare model or gave the detainees POW status, you would not be able to get intelligence information to ave lives and destroy the terrorist netword. Under either the lawfare model or the POW model the detainees could not be compel to talk with interrogators. Is that really what these people want? I believe it is. They want to give people whose objective is mass murder of non combatants constitutional and POW rights even though they are not entitled to under the very terms of the Genena Convention or common sense. These detainees are with an entity that is not a signatory to the convention nor does it abide by them. It targets non combatants and endangers non combatants by camoflouging its terrorist as civilians. It also uses civilians as human shields and the Euro weenies want them to get a way with this ocnduct. They want these guys released. Their position defies logic, the law or common sense.