Crossposted at RedState.
The victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.
- Sun Tzu
Patrick’s post today on de-gimmicking the conservative movement makes an excellent point. We need to choose our battles, find conservative policies with overwhelming public support, and vigorously advance them in non-ideological terms. The approach worked with the Contract for America in 1994, and it worked with Drill Here Drill Now last year. When we find conservative policies with overwhelming support and draw upon the American people to create change, it works very well.
President Obama's January 22nd executive order, which ordered the closing of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, opened the door to such a winning 80/20 American issue. President Obama’s order will close the Guantanamo facility within one year of its signing and ordered an extensive revision of terrorist detainee policy which would determine where the Guantanamo detainees will go and what will happen to the detainees of the future. The executive order was a controversial document that has been assaulted from both the left and the right. However, most Americans overwhelmingly agree with conservatives on the key issue at hand and we should use this opportunity to advance sound national security policy, not gimmickry.
The Combatant vs. Criminal Battle and the Features of the Field
At its core, this is a struggle over whether terrorist detainees should be treated as civilian criminals or as combatant prisoners of war. Conservatives typically believe that terrorists should be treated as combatants, and liberals believe they should be treated as criminals.
This is a complex issue, and the major polls investigating the question can sometimes be misleading. For example, a recent ABC poll claimed that Americans supported trying detainees in civilian courts over releasing them to their home countries by a 2-1 margin. This may seem to demonstrate support for the terrorist-as-criminal position, but the question did not include the option of military tribunals.
Fortunately, when presented with the choice of providing detainees with civilian trials or using the military tribunal system, Americans strongly believe terrorist detainees should be treated as combatants, not criminals. In a January 27th Rasmussen poll, 69% said that terrorists should not be given all the rights of citizens, and 59% supported using military tribunals vs. 26% who supported using civilian trials to process detainee cases.
Furthermore, Americans do not want Guantanamo detainees (and presumably future detainees) transferred to the US, and certainly not in their own communities. A recent Opinion Dynamics poll reveals that 63% of all Americans, including majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and independents, do not want prisoners from Guantanamo Bay moved to prisons in their community, and a 52-47% majority do not want them in the US at all.
It is important to note that Guantanamo Bay itself has a negative connotation in the minds of the public that puts downward pressure on polling regarding the central criminal vs. combatant debate. The Rasmussen poll did not mention Guantanamo Bay in its questions about military tribunals and measured a large 33-point terrorist-as-combatant majority, while the ABC poll measured support for ‘continuing to hold [detainees] at Guantanamo’ rather than military tribunals and returned a relatively small 53-42 majority in favor of the terrorist-as-criminal approach.
With this knowledge and the work of Frank Luntz in mind, it would be wise for those of us who hold the terrorist-as-combatant view to let the Guantanamo Bay facility close. We should instead focus on the future by pushing the Administration to adopt a forward-looking counterterrorism detainee policy that is based on the terrorist-as-combatant view held by most Americans when Guantanamo is out of the picture. Sixty-eight percent of Americans, including majorities of Republicans, independents and Democrats, right-of-center terrorism experts Charles Stimson and James Jay Carafano, and even Newt Gingrich support the creation of a new set of clear international rules to set transparent guidelines for how countries can fight the War on Terror. If the process of creating these rules is transparent, the American people have the ability to provide their input into the process, and we have experts to publicly articulate the terrorist-as-combatant approach, the result would be a clearer, more stable system than what we have now which would ensure that dangerous combatants are not treated like fish in some catch-and-release system and allowed to return to the battlefield and kill again.
