Message 21452681
Hegseth is full of praise for the soldiers he knows at Guantanamo. "I think all Americans would be proud of these guys," he says....According to Hegseth, guards sometimes encounter detainees who spit at them, or throw urine or feces at them. "But if a soldier ever appears to be having a problem with this kind of conduct," Hegseth notes, "he's immediately removed from the block."
In the end, some of the shrillest critics of American defense policy are probably not especially interested in Guantanamo as such, but see it as a convenient opportunity to criticize an institution of which they are deeply suspicious -- the American military -- and to cast doubt on the morality of America's war on terror.
If things are this bad at Gitmo, the reasoning goes, the whole war must be wrong.
Hegseth puts it like this: "Critics ask, 'How are we to win if we are conducting ourselves this way?' I think the opposite: If we're conducting ourselves this way, it's evidence that our cause is just."
The Democrats' attack on the military through the proxy of Guantanamo Bay has been a fiasco for them, domestically, at least--abroad, it has contributed to anti-Americanism and made the administration's task more difficult. Here at home, the Democrats are now, to employ their mantra, moving on. |
