It seemed so easy. Guantanamo was a moral outrage. It was hurting America’s image abroad. It wasn’t really making us safer. In fact, by enraging Muslims around the world, it was making us less safe. So shut it down.

That was Barack Obama’s thinking, and, on January 22, two days after he was sworn in, he signed an executive order stating, “The detention facilities at Guantanamo shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than 1 year from the date of this order.”

But on Tuesday, by a vote of 90-6, the Senate joined the House in refusing the president’s request for funds to close Guantanamo until Obama explains exactly how he is going to do it.

As Karen DeYoung wrote in the Washington Post: “Lawmakers of both parties spoke out against imprisoning or releasing any of the detainees in the United States.” The vote came less than a week after the president issued what Karl Rove called a “stunning and welcome about-face” on another matter involving Guantanamo. After calling President Bush’s military tribunals for terror detainees an “enormous failure” and a “legal black hole,” he decided not to junk them but to keep them.

On Guantanamo closure, however, the president refused to back down—for now. He said in a speech at the National Archives yesterday that the detention facility is “quite simply a mess, a misguided experiment” he inherited from President Bush and that he would transfer terrorists to the United States but keep them secure in the criminal justice system here. To make the point, earlier this week, the Justice Department said it would move Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, an alleged al Qaeda terrorist indicted in the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa, from Guantanamo to New York for trial.

But the truth is that Obama is not going to be able to buck Congress. He has a huge problem on his hands.

He made a hasty decision to close the Guantanamo facility without considering what a difficult task he had set for himself, and, in his disdain for all things Bushian, he underestimated certain strong and deep and appropriate American sentiment. As former Vice President Dick Cheney put it yesterday in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Obama decided to close Guantanamo “with little deliberation and no plan.”

To close Guantanamo, then, means either to release unsupervised terrorists back into the world to kill more innocents or to send them to the United States—perhaps under greater control, but perhaps not.

You would hardly know it from the coverage, but Barack Obama is not the first U.S. president to want to close Guantanamo. George W. Bush said of Gitmo on June 21, 2006: “It is my deep desire to end this program.” And, lord knows, he tried. A total of about 800 detainees entered the Guantanamo facility at one time or another over the past seven years. Of those, more than 500 were released and five died (four by suicide, one by natural causes). Roughly 240 remain. President Bush said many times that he wanted to release most of these—that is, the vast majority that would not stand trial. But release them where?

In Cheney’s phrase, some of the smartest minds of the Bush administration deliberated and tried to devise a plan, but they were thwarted by circumstance. I know because, as undersecretary of State for public diplomacy and public affairs, I heard the discussions—over and over. Efforts were made tirelessly and at the highest levels.

There were, however, three separate difficulties: 1) the home countries of many of the detainees simply refused to take them back, no matter how much effort we applied to convincing them otherwise; 2) some countries might take their citizens back but then (as in the case with China’s Uighurs) might kill or otherwise harm them; and 3) some countries might take the detainees back but are unlikely to keep an eye on them after they returned.

This last issue is not trivial. The New York Times reported today that an unreleased Pentagon report found that “one in seven of the 534 prisoners already transferred abroad from the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has returned to terrorism or militant activity.”

The plurality of the detainees who remain at Gitmo are from Yemen. And Saudi Arabia, for example, has imprisoned some Gitmo veterans, limited the travel of others and put those it thought it could co-opt through a “de-radicalization” program. Dan Ephron, in a prescient article in Newsweek in January, wrote: “‘Yemen doesn’t want to be seen as doing anything for the United States,’ says the former official, who declined to be named discussing sensitive diplomacy. Even if it agreed to U.S. demands, Yemen might not have the capability to honor them. ‘It has areas of the country that are poorly governed and its borders are porous,’ said the former official.”

To close Guantanamo, then, means either to release unsupervised terrorists back into the world to kill more innocents or to send them to the United States—perhaps under greater control, but perhaps not.

Do terrorists kill people because of their rage over Guantanamo? I am skeptical of such alleged motivation.

On American soil, it will be extremely difficult to avoid denying the niceties of American criminal justice to the detainees. And, no doubt, courts will order some of these detainees freed. Again, the question will be where. And one can easily imagine a judge saying, “The U.S. government detained this person. If his country does not want him back, then the United States has an obligation to keep him.” In addition, the judge could certainly deny the government the authority to supervise the released detainee, who would be, after all, deemed innocent.

The matter of how to handle enemy combatants in this war (and, make no mistake, it is a war—they want to kill us, and we want to stop them) is a wickedly complicated one. The idea of Guantanamo was not bad at all. It was American soil, but it appeared at the beginning, at any rate, that detainees would not be entitled to the protections of U.S. criminal law—as they indeed should not, in my view. Court rulings have since eroded that rationale.

Even if we did close Guantanamo, we would have to face the same questions in the future: Are Al Qaeda fighters criminals or soldiers? Should we allow them the protections of the Geneva Conventions even if these fighters clearly do not qualify?

Gitmo requires deep thought, not glib pronouncements. It also requires a dose of reality.

I have been to Guantanamo. It was a day trip, and I do not pretend be a penology expert, but what I saw was a clean, well-run facility, where detainees (except the worst of the worse) can commune, take exercise, pray five times a day, eat well, read, learn English, and watch videos (their favorite is “The Deadliest Catch,” about Alaskan crabbers).

The guards respect Islam. During prayers, visitors are told to keep their voices down and stay unobtrusive. The food is good (I ate the detainee lunch of meatloaf and salad), and the healthcare abundant (the doctors told me that, physically and mentally, the average detainee is healthier than the average American). A Belgian antiterrorist official who visited said, “At the level of the detention facilities, it is a model prison, where people are better treated than in Belgian prisons.”

In fact, whatever Gitmo may have been in the past, the facility’s actual dangers today are the ones to which the guards are exposed: disgusting and deadly “cocktails” that some of the detainees mix from their own feces and urine and throw at the military.

But what about the image that concerns the president and others so much?

Has Guantanamo become a symbol of American brutality and high-handedness? Certainly. Do terrorists kill people because of their rage over Guantanamo? I am skeptical of such alleged motivation. After all, the first World Trade Center bombing, the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, the bombings of the two embassies in Africa, and 9/11 itself were all perpetrated without the existence of a U.S. detention center for terrorists at Guantanamo or anywhere else.

But are there methods, using the tools of public diplomacy, to address the misperception of Gitmo without releasing the majority of the remaining detainees into America’s cities and towns? I believe so, and in my final months at the State Department, I was addressing that issue, as were foreign-service officers in places like Kuwait. It was no piece of cake—in part, because there was resistance at the State and Defense departments to dealing, in a public-diplomacy sense, with Gitmo at all. Better to bury your head in the sand.

The answer, both politically and practically, is not to shut the place down abruptly. Whatever the president said this week, I think he is learning that foreign policy and national security—especially as they relate to America’s image abroad—are matters a lot more thorny than they appear from the outside and that to do the opposite of what George Bush did is not a strategy but, in some cases, a dangerous trap.

James K. Glassman, a former senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, served as undersecretary of State for public diplomacy and public affairs from 2008 to early 2009. He is president of World Growth, an organization that promotes economic development.

Image by Darren Wamboldt/Bergman Group