The idea of providing a home to terror suspects sparks a revealing fuss in Kansas

IF AN “irresponsible” Barack Obama moves terrorists from Guantánamo Bay to a military prison in Kansas, he would be painting a target on every hospital and school in the area. That is the view of the state’s senior senator, Pat Roberts. “Not on my watch,” Mr Roberts assured supporters huddled in a rain-lashed shopping mall in Wichita on October 13th, to much applause and nodding of heads. Mr Roberts, a 78-year-old Republican, promises to halt all Senate business, if need be, to stop the president from emptying the prison camp in Cuba and sending its remaining detainees to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, home to America’s only maximum-security military prison.
Pedants might object that Leavenworth has not actually been asked to take any detainees—though the Kansas prison was one of several sites considered in 2009, after Mr Obama took office declaring that he would close Guantánamo in a matter of months. No matter. A recent press report—denied, a bit half-heartedly, by the White House—suggested that officials are pondering how the president might use executive powers to close Guantánamo before his term ends, if Congress maintains its current ban on moving detainees to the mainland. Americans have been put in a jumpy mood by grim global headlines, lending a “safety-first” edge to mid-term congressional elections on November 4th.
More to the point, Mr Roberts is facing a tough re-election fight, though Kansas is a solidly conservative prairie state. After 34 years in Congress he finds himself in a tight spot, squeezed between local Tea Party purists (who think he has forgotten his Kansas roots) and old-school moderate Republicans (tempted by an independent candidate, Greg Orman, who says both parties have forgotten how to compromise).
All in all, Mr Roberts has every incentive to talk up fights with the White House. Asked to guess at the president’s motives, he frowns. Mr Obama thinks that closing Guantánamo “will make things better in the Muslim world”, he ventures. Perhaps, he goes on, the president thinks that Islamic State fighters will say: “Oh, that’s wonderful.”
Other Republicans, led by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, have accused the president of being “eager” to bring terrorists into the country, and have pressed Democrats to denounce him (Mr Orman, for his part, calls Mr Obama “absolutely wrong” to want Guantánamo detainees on American soil). Critics are on firm political ground: since 2009 polls have shown two-thirds of Americans opposed to closing Guantánamo and moving detainees to the mainland.
Understandably, Republican leaders want the 2014 election to be a referendum on Mr Obama, and what they see as his weak, naive handling of a world on fire. Ask Kansans why they do not want to receive any of the 149 remaining Guantánamo detainees, and echoes of that complaint come up. “Sure, we have super-max prisons, they wouldn’t escape,” says a retired oil-worker in Wichita, Ken Jarvis. But once in America they would be granted lawyers sympathetic to their cause, he predicts, adding darkly: “There’s probably Muslim attorneys.” Before long, he thinks, dangerous men would be free to walk the streets.
When Leavenworth last thought it might be receiving Guantánamo detainees, five years ago, 95% of locals were opposed, says the mayor, Mark Preisinger. Not because Leavenworth, a sturdy city of red brick and grey stone beside the Missouri river, is prone to hysteria. It has been a prison town since the 19th century. Between the army, the federal government, the state of Kansas and a private corrections corporation, five large prisons brood in and around the city. It is a military town, home to elite staff colleges for high-flying officers from America and abroad. The city high school sends between 20 and 30 students a year into the armed forces. Still, residents feel in “lockstep” that the place to keep the detainees is Guantánamo, says the mayor.
That prison camp—built in an American naval base maintained by treaty on Cuba’s eastern tip—is called a legal limbo, scoffs a local Republican state senator, Steve Fitzgerald. Well, good. “Why shouldn’t they just rot?” he asks, calling many detainees unfit to enter the criminal-justice system and undeserving of the status of prisoners-of-war.

If we cannot be loved, let us be feared

During these and other Kansan conversations, it becomes clear that the politics of Guantánamo involves not just a verdict on Mr Obama. In this security-tinged election, America is also having a debate about the legacy of George W. Bush. Go back to the 2008 election, and Mr Obama spoke like a man with a sweeping mandate to reverse the priorities of the Bush era. Where his predecessor had held international laws cheap, Team Obama would restore America’s global standing (and closing Guantánamo would symbolise that fresh start). America is war-weary, Mr Obama said repeatedly: time for some nation-building at home, and drawing a line under endless war.
The evidence is mounting that Mr Obama misread his mandate. In such conservative places as Leavenworth, people are not sure America is war-weary. “The nation hasn’t been at war, it’s been the military,” says Eric Hollister, a retired lieutenant-colonel and veteran of Iraq who instructs cadets at the high school. The past 13 years have hardly been like the second world war, he adds, when America dug Victory Gardens to supplement rations.
The country is certainly fed up with calls to fix the world: Democrats and Republicans alike say it is not America’s job to take the lead in solving international problems. But far from thanking Mr Obama for delivering the cautious, diffident foreign policy that such polls would seem to demand, voters are turning on him. The Guantánamo saga helps to explain this puzzle. Americans do not want endless war. But right now, many put feeling safe above the pursuit of peace.