Guantanamo as the Lesser Evil

The Opinionator

Should liberals want to keep the detention center at Guantanamo Bay open? “[C]losing GTMO would much more [likely] result in more detainees being held in facilities closer to the actual ‘battlefield,’ such as Bagram, rather than in domestic [facilities],” writes Georgetown law professor Marty Lederman at the group legal blog Balkinization. “And that would hardly improve matters from a legal or human rights perspective. Moreover, if GTMO were closed, more of the detainees there might be transferred to nations such as Libya, where there is a real risk that they may be tortured.” He concludes, “A better idea would be for Congress to require that due process and some form of meaningful judicial review be provided at GTMO and at other detention facilities around the globe.”

At The Plank, The New Republic’s Michael Crowley finds Thomas Sowell fantasizing about the salutary effects of an American military coup: “When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia,” he writes, “I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.”

The alternative minimum tax: Mend it, but don’t end it. The A.M.T. could be “a taxpayer-friendly, flat tax rate for the middle class [$],” writes David R. Henderson, a research fellow with the Hoover Institution and an economics professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal. He adds:

But 26 percent and 28 percent are high tax rates for a flat-tax system. So — and here’s the good news for taxpayers — another reform of the A.M.T. should be to lower these rates to one rate, say 24 percent or even 20 percent. Although few people remember this now, the A.M.T. rate as recently as 1986 was 20 percent. Then President Reagan and Congress raised it to 21 percent with the 1986 Tax Reform Act; President Bush and Congress raised it to 24 percent in the 1990 tax bill; and in the1993 tax bill President Clinton and Congress imposed rates of 26 percent and 28 percent. Along with lower rates could go a further limitation on deductible expenses, again a longtime goal of advocates of flat tax rates. All of these reforms could be done so that the federal government gets the same revenue it would have had absent these reforms.

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Wolfowitz and the Wages of Hubris

Paul Wolfowitz’s failures as a war architect and as a World Bank president flow from the same source, suggests Washington Post columnist David Ignatius: “The lesson of Wolfowitz’s failure is that you can’t change things unless you truly understand them. That was true in Iraq, and it was true at the World Bank.”

Ignatius calls Wolfowitz “an idealist who understood everything, except his own limitations.” He adds, “When Wolfowitz decamped to the World Bank in 2005, he took with him two abiding characteristics of the neoconservatives — a passion for transformation and a disdain for lesser beings wedded to the status quo.”

The fatal flaws of Wolfowitz and of the Bush administration are one and the same, Ignatius says. He writes:

Wolfowitz has failed at the World Bank not because his underlings were out to get him (though many probably were) but because he treated the organization itself as an enemy. He saw its professional staff as an impediment to achieving his goals, rather than as a potential ally. Instead of heeding advice to work with the prickly international staff and win them over, he installed a palace guard of Americans who, like him, exuded the cocky “we know best” confidence of the Bush administration.

This disdain for career staff officers — whether at the Pentagon, the C.I.A., the Justice Department or an international agency such as the World Bank — is a defining characteristic of the Bush administration and a big reason for its undoing. Administration officials are arrogant — no other way to put it. They ignore the advice of the professionals, whom they regard as obstacles to their agenda of transformation. In their impetuous self-confidence, they become wreckers.

This hubris recurs again and again. We saw it in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s high-handed management style, in Vice President Cheney’s continuous pressure on C.I.A. analysts to bolster the administration’s message on Iraq, in C.I.A. Director Porter Goss’s purge of agency officers suspected of disloyalty, in Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s treatment of career attorneys at Justice.