Gitmo Nimbies

In 1980 in the Christian Science Monitor coined the acronym NIMBY—Not In My Back Yard—to describe opposition by residents to a proposal for a new development close to them (Nimbies are people who oppose such developments). In America, Nimbies typically oppose subsidized housing, halfway houses, homeless shelters, and other structures that might bring “unsavory characters” into their neighborhood. They are all for such developments in theory—they just don’t want them in their own back yard.

As President Obama is discovering , our allies may want us to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, but they’re Nimbies when it comes to taking the prisoners into their own countries:

President Barack Obama is now confirming what many have long suspected: He will miss his January deadline to close the Guantanamo prison — partly because he cannot persuade other nations to take the detainees.

Prisoners like Walid Abu Hijazi. The 29-year-old Palestinian is nearing his eighth year at February 2008. No one else has been willing to allow him, or dozens of others, into their territory.

This dilemma is one of the chief obstacles to closing the jail, according to lawyers and human rights groups who monitor U.S. detention policy. Most say Washington bears the main blame because it also refuses to accept prisoners on American soil.

“It’s very difficult to persuade third countries to accept the political or security risks involved, especially when the United States has been unwilling to accept that risk itself,” said Matthew Waxman, a professor at Columbia Law School.

The cynical view would be to assume that Obama knew this all along (since anyone familiar with the situation knew this was the case) and that he made a promise to close Gitmo while knowing full well that he could never make it happen. The more charitable perspective—the one I subscribe to—is that the President really was naive enough to believe that his personal charm and popularity across the world would be enough to convince our allies to take suspected terrorists off our hands. Let’s hope this is a sobering reminder that governing isn’t the same as campaigning and that hope and change have to be more than cute slogans.

(Via: HotAir )