The Washington Post’s Anne Kornblut and ProPublica’s Dafna Linzer write something resembling a postmortem on the Obama White House’s effort to close Guantanamo Bay. Announcing a Jan. 20, 2010 deadline to close the detention camp was White House Counsel Gregory Craig’s idea. And this hard deadline was politcally dumb, because the administration hadn’t determined what to do with the Guantanamo detainees. So Craig is no longer the point man on Guantanamo, replaced by political “fix-it” man Peter Rouse.

I’m sympathetic with Craig’s explanation of things:

Craig said Thursday that some of his early assumptions were based on miscalculations, in part because Bush administration officials and senior Republicans in Congress had spoken publicly about closing the facility. “I thought there was, in fact, and I may have been wrong, a broad consensus about the importance to our national security objectives to close Guantanamo and how keeping Guantanamo open actually did damage to our national security objectives,” he said.

Yes, there was a broad consensus — basically every Democratic lawmaker as well as George W. Bush and several GOP lawmakers had come around to seeing Guantanamo as a national disgrace. In a system of government actually concerned about governing, Congress and the White House would then logically work together to close the prison. Instead, lawmakers saw the hard-to-reach Guantanamo deadline as a way to politically weaken Obama and polish their tough-on-terror bona fides.

The Obama/Craig deadline may have been a dumb decision politically. But it wasn’t a major strategic blunder — it’s not like our national security was suddenly compromised because Obama laid out a timeline. What’s important now is for the White House and Justice Dept. to determine the fate of each individual detainee, not rush to make good on closing the camp where these detainees are held.

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