I had dinner last night with my old friend Will, the lawyer, and, right off, after the first beer he said, President Bush is as dumb as a post.

Now, Will is an old Reagan man. He remembers seeing Reagan’s speech for Goldwater on TV in 1964 and he’s a purist. He still thinks of the Bushies who stole into Reagan’s tent at the Detroit Convention in 1980 as a horde of Vandals or Visigoths. Choosing George Bush, Sr., as his Vice President was about the only thing Reagan ever did he didn’t like.

And George Bush the Younger has pretty much fulfilled all his fears. In Will’s eyes, while flying conservative colors, George W. Bush has sold out conservatives (as Will says, ‘Just look at the deficit’) and left the Republican Party politically bankrupt.

But last night he wasn’t talking about history. He was talking about the Supreme Court ruling that the terrorists locked up at Guantanamo Bay have habeas corpus rights – and he was wearing his practical political hat.

“Look here,” he said. “Justice Kennedy writes, The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times. Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system they are reconciled within the framework of the law – and everyone in the Bush administration is screaming bloody murder because they can’t keep whomever the president says is a terrorist locked up a hundred years without a trial.

“Now, I can’t think of anything better for Bush – or McCain – than putting 400 terrorists on trial before the election. What if every one of them gets half as much publicity as this Paddock woman got at her trial here in Raleigh?”

Will’s painting his case with a bit of hyperbole and political overstatement – but he’s got a point.

The only way for democracies to give up hedonism and the pursuit of happiness long enough to confront an external threat for more than fifteen minutes – and win a war – requires them being scared silly. Then all the interest groups bent on getting their hands on power – or the federal treasury – stop fighting long enough to realize they have at least one thing in common. But it takes a real sustained burst of fear to accomplish that kind of unity. The Japanese did it for us in 1941 by destroying our fleet and conquering a good chunk of Asia in the first three months of World War II.

And Lincoln understood it during the Civil War – he figured out he only had one real goal: To unite the North and keep it fighting because if he did he couldn’t lose.

But President Bush never understood that. So he never built that kind of unity. Instead, during his presidency, the terrorists have gone from a threat to a kind of nuisance.

He locked the jihadists in jail in Cuba and tried them secretly (or not at all) in front of military tribunals when what should he have done, Will is saying, is put them all on trial down at the federal courthouse and let the American people have a good hard look at them. Now the Supreme Court’s told him that’s what he’s got to do – and his administration is howling like a stuck hog.

But the fact is letting folks get a good look at those terrorists in Cuba is a lot more important than any benefits to be gained by fighting them in secret. Courts no doubt will be messier than military tribunals but real trials will contribute to the only thing that matters – unity – and tribunals won’t.

Here’s Will’s bottom line: “If I were President Bush,” he says, “I’d start the trials tomorrow. That way they’ll have up a full head of steam by Election Day.”

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