The road to apathy is paved with post-election disappointment. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said Sunday that closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay "has proven more complicated than anticipated." An Economist blogger mocks him thusly:
Really? Figuring out what to do with hundreds of people held for years without charge on often flimsy terrorism allegations—not to mention those who almost certainly are terrorists, but who have been implicated by evidence obtained by torture—is complicated? Who could have imagined that?
We expect our leaders to have their eyes on the big picture, but they all too often seem focused on the day-to-day. Take the run-up to Iraq, for example. Or the housing bubble. The anonymous Economist writer also cites General Stanley McChrystal, the American commander in Afghanistan, who, when asked about the resurgent Taliban, said just last week, "The geographic spread of violence is a little more than I would have gathered." Maybe I'm in the wrong business, because I've been reading about that for months.