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Greg Craig, White House Counsel, has tendered his resignation (PDF file), in what The Washington Post calls the administration’s highest level shake up:

The departure comes after months of dissatisfaction over Craig’s management of Guantanamo policy and other matters and less than a month after officials said Craig was no longer guiding the effort to close the prison. His departure represents the highest-level White House shake-up to date.

Craig is a respected attorney who became more prominent for his defense work for President Clinton. The Washington Post story credits him with being one of the first Clinton administration insiders to support the campaign of then-Senator Barack Obama. Criag wrote a scathing editorial criticizing candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy credentials and, as The Washington Post reports, sought a foreign policy position in the new administration.

Craig is credited with influencing President Obama’s hurried executive order promising closure of the Guantanamo detainee facility in Cuba. It was a move he felt had broad support:

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.

Both major candidates had promised to close Gitmo, so Craig’s assessment is understandable. What the new administration found out is that bold strokes stand out, and actually doing things is harder than talking about them:

White House officials have conceded they will not make the January closure deadline that Craig helped Obama settle on and are at a loss as to where to house a number of hard cases who cannot be transferred to foreign countries or tried in U.S. or military courts.

Cross-posted to Donklephant.com

Politics detainees, Gitmo, Greg Craig, war on terror

Things always look different from the “other side” of the fence, as the Washington Post points out this morning:

The Obama administration has for the first time set out its views on the controversial USA Patriot Act, telling lawmakers this week that legal approval of government surveillance methods scheduled to expire in December should be renewed, but leaving room to tweak the law to protect Americans’ privacy.

Perhaps an apology is due the Bush Administration.

Those of us distressed by President Obama’s headlong rush to re-enact the economic and taxation policies of the 1970s are generally heartened by his foreign policy initiatives. An early mis-step had us worried: the ham-handed proposal to close Gitmo but still retain the policy of indefinite detention seemed dangerously symbolic and without substance. We were afraid his policies vis-a-vis the … what do we call them now? … oh yeah, terrorists … was window dressing. Changing the geographical location but not the practices seemed disingenuous. The fact that the left cheered it revealed they weren’t serious about it in the first place, and “close Gitmo” was more of a jingoistic campaign slogan than a heartfelt political position. A foreign policy predicated on appearance alone is one destined for problems, leading to dead Americans.

But to his credit, President Obama seems intent on continuing most of the successful Bush policies, including those concerning domestic surveillance. Sure, the language has changed with “speaking softly” being emphasized over publicly wielding the “big stick”. But for results-orientated conservatives, this is a good sign.

There’s still much to worry about … President Obama’s “World Apology Tour” generated as much media buzz as a Rolling Stones concert tour, and had about as much effect. Iran is more pugnacious, and North Korea remains as intransigent as ever. But, as Daniel Pipes notes, there may be reason for at least a bit of optimism over at least one aspect of the new middle east policy:

Instead of Israel making yet more unilateral concessions to the Palestinians, in late May Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu called to “bring Arab states into the circle of peace.” U.S. special envoy George Mitchell and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak picked up on this and developed plans to integrate those Arab states into the diplomatic process. In mid-July, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asserted that “Arab states have a responsibility … to take steps to improve relations with Israel, and to prepare their publics to embrace peace and accept Israel’s place in the region.”

A month later, Barack Obama declared his hope that “we are going to see not just movement from the Israelis, but also from the Palestinians around issues of incitement and security, from Arab states that show their willingness to engage Israel.” According to Foreign Policy blogger Laura Rozen – later confirmed by the White House – Obama “sent letters to at least seven Arab and Gulf states seeking confidence-building measures [CBMs] toward Israel.” (Those states include Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.)

This is a left leaning administration, but like every American President, when the rubber meets the road they tend to move towards practical solutions. There is hope that President Obama can resist the more narrow tendencies of his party’s dominance in the Congress to moderate the left-ward lurch back to the “stagflation” of the 1970s.

Politics Israel, obama, war on terror