Who's the man to the left of Gregory Craig?

The Washington Post’s Anne E. Kornblut and Ellen Nakashima report that White House Counsel Gregory Craig will likely resign his post and be replaced by Bob Bauer, Barack Obama’s personal attorney. The “controversy” surrounding Craig is that he orchestrated the administration’s decision to announce a hard — Jan, 20, 2010 — deadline for closing Guantanamo Bay.

As I blogged before, I’m sympathetic with Craig’s decision to impose the hard deadline. Almost everyone — John McCain, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, anybody in the Democratic caucus — said in 2007/2008 that Guantanamo needed to be shut down. So Craig acted on what seemed to be a broad consensus to end this international human rights embarrassment. Now he is being faulted for not accounting for the utter myopia, irrationality, opportunism and provincialism of both Democratic and Republican members of Congress who declared it a national security threat for detainees to be imprisoned in the U.S.

Also, the hard deadline maybe was savvy politics, because it exposed Congress as irrational on Guantanamo. Now the Obama administration is able to spread the blame to lawmakers when it misses the deadline.

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