Germany's Dangerous Gitmo Gamble

German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier is on the campaign trail. He is running as the left-wing SPD party's candidate to replace incumbent center-right CDU Chancellor Angela Merkel in the Bundestag elections set for September 27, 2009. For Steinmeier--a rather dull 53-year-old technocrat-turned-politician who had previously served as Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's chief of staff--this marks the first time ever that he is competing for elected office. To avoid any risk that this political novice stumble in his first campaign, the SPD party gave him a safe district in the former East German state of Brandenburg.

Back in 2002, Steinmeier's boss ran on a populist, anti-Bush platform and made a successful, last-ditch effort to save his faltering re-election campaign by confronting Washington head-on over the Iraq war along with French president Jacques Chirac. Seven years later, Schroeder's disciple Steinmeier is pursuing a very different political strategy vis-à-vis the United States: Given President Obama's phenomenal popularity ratings in Germany (remember that speech in front of 200,000 fans in Berlin last July?), Steinmeier is now over-eager to appear as someone who is held in high esteem by the new president and his administration--especially with regard to the issue of granting select Guantanamo inmates political asylum in Germany. In fact, Steinmeier has been one of the EU's earliest and most outspoken proponents of the notion that Europe should help the Obama administration close down Gitmo by accepting those allegedly "innocent" and "harmless" inmates who cannot be returned to their countries of origin for fear of being persecuted and tortured there. In the case of Germany, Steinmeier is specifically pushing for the admission of nine Uighurs, Muslim-Chinese men who were arrested by U.S. forces during anti-terrorist operations in Afghanistan back in 2002-2003.

Washington is in dire need of European support on the crucial Guantanamo issue if it wants to comply with President Obama's ambitious executive order to close down the camp by January 21, 2010. Just two weeks ago, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Dan Fried, the new Guantanamo special envoy, toured several European capitals to drum up support for the permanent relocation of about 30 of the remaining 241 Guantanamo inmates to countries such as France, Germany, and the UK. Of course, Dan Fried, who until recently served as the State Department's top Europe man under Condi Rice, knows full well that in recent years, prominent EU leaders like Mr. Steinmeier had repeatedly rebuffed similar attempts by the Bush administration to enlist Europe's support in the closure of Guantanamo. While European politicians would routinely decry Washington's blatant disregard of international law with respect to Guantanamo, none of these leaders wanted to be seen as cooperating with the hugely unpopular Bush administration on this very complex and difficult issue. Clearly, the German foreign minister's sudden change of heart on the Gitmo dossier smacks of hypocrisy and had probably more to do with political expediency during an uphill election campaign rather than genuine human rights concerns.