It may or may not be a good idea to close the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba facility used by the U.S. to detain terrorists suspects.

But President Barack Obama's repeated argument, made again Tuesday during his statement on the after-action review of the failed Christmas Day bombing, that Guantanamo should be closed because so long as it's open it's a ready recruiting tool for al-Qaida is probably among the weakest reasons to close it.

That's because al-Qaida has no shortage of recruiting messages to use on the impressionable and others predisposed to do its bidding. And they make new ones up as time goes on and situations change.

For instance, long before Guantanamo became a household word, the presence of U.S. troops in Arab lands was an early motivator used by al-Qaida recruiters.

After Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Saudi Arabia welcomed U.S. troops to the kingdom to protect it from an Iraq invasion.

Bin Laden took it as an insult to Islam that Americans were in the land of the two holy places in Mecca and Medina, two of Islam's holiest cities, and made this a casus belli to attack the U.S. and, later, Saudi officials.

 

Building his case against the U.S. and the West, bin Laden has used the unceasing Palestinian-Israeli conflict as another recruiting tool.

Whatever the U.S. eventually does with Guantanamo, it seems a safe bet that the core problem that has dominated the Middle East for generations is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon so that bin Laden and al-Qaida can no longer use it as a rallying cry.

Even if the world could somehow end the Israel-Arab tensions, bin Laden would still have as a rallying point his dream of what University of Michigan scholar Juan Cole has called an Islamic superstate. Bin Laden talks of it as a caliphate spanning all predominantly Muslim nations.

Then there are the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan that al-Qaida has used for recruitment purposes. Al-Qaida has also argued that the perceived moral corruption of the West threaten Muslims and Islam, making Westerners acceptable targets.

So al-Qaida has plenty of marketing messages with or without Guantanamo.

Again, strong arguments can be made for closing the facility or keeping it open. But Obama's argument that keeping it open represents a significant boon to al-Qaida's recruiting efforts and therefore is reason enough to close it, is among the least persuasive argument of all.