"Gitmo Cocktail"

THE demands to shut down our Guantanamo lock-up for terrorists have nothing to do with human rights. They're about punishing America for our power and success.

...so starts Ralph Peters' brilliant article on the hue and cry concerning Guantanamo.

The Gitmo controversy is about many things, from jealousy of the United States and outrage that we refuse to fail, to residual anger that we won the Cold War and exploded the left's great fantasy of a dictatorship of the intellectuals.

They'll keep trying to gain control of Europe, though....now here's where Peters draws his battle lines:

The truth is that the terrorists and their defenders have something in common. It's not courage, which is one quality violent fanatics don't lack. It's that neither can be appeased.

Any concession only increases their appetites. The Clinton administration's reluctance to respond to terrorist strikes encouraged al Qaeda. If the Bush administration closed the Guantanamo facility, any alternative holding center would be attacked just as rabidly and dishonestly.

If we put our captives up at the Four Seasons, we'd be condemned because somebody smelled bacon at breakfast.

Best. Analogy. Ever. I like the next one too - left-wing ideologues as fundamentalists!

You can't negotiate with terrorists. And you cannot reason with ideologues — whether they're Islamist fanatics or pathetic old lefties fishing for a cause to give meaning to squandered lives. Terrorists, French and German neo-Stalinists, and our own democracy-hating intelligentsia aren't interested in facts. It's all about the comfort of belief.

Now here's the key point, the one that decent Americans need to understand:

Let's get this straight: Nothing we could do would appease those who feel a need for our country to fail. We must stop trying to satisfy them.

Read it all here: http://www.nypost.com/seven/06162005/postopinion/opedcolumnists/25151.htm