By Justin Doolittle | Crimethink | 5.31.2013
Charles Krauthammer likes war. Any war, really, but the War on Terror in particular. It’s kind of his raison d’être; no one cares what he has to say about domestic policy, so if this glorious clash between the Last, Best Hope on Earth and The Islamofascistterroristevildoers were to end, he might just sink into relative irrelevance.
Charles has written a new column and he is very upset that President Obama seems to believe that this war should not continue into eternity:
Obama says enough is enough. He doesn’t want us on “a perpetual wartime footing.” Well, the Cold War lasted 45 years. The War on Terror, twelve so far. By Obama’s calculus, we should have declared the Cold War over in 1958 and left Western Europe, our Pacific allies, the entire free world, to fend for itself — and consigned Eastern Europe to endless darkness.
This is actually false. Krauthammer is evidently unaware that the War on Terror was first declared by the Reagan administration in 1983. It was re-declared by the Bush administration in 2001. The United States has been waging its War on Terror, in fact, for thirty years now. Moving on:
This is John Lennon, bumper-sticker foreign policy – “Imagine World Peace.” Obama pretends that the tide of war is receding.
Just take a minute to consider the absurdity of these two sentences. As Glenn Greenwald pointed out in a recent column, Barack Obama “has spent almost five years killing people in multiple countries around the world.” It’s simply delusional to claim that Obama is some Lennon-like hippie who rejects military violence; his prosecution of this war, in several areas, has been even more ruthless and intense than that of his predecessor. Obama has surely surpassed Krauthammer’s wildest expectations in his penchant for killing Muslims around the world. Apparently, though, it’s not sufficient. More death and destruction are needed.
Krauthammer then spends a few paragraphs paying tribute to one of the other loves of his life, the prison at Guantanamo Bay, and excoriating Obama for not thinking it’s awesome and wanting to keep it open forever. Then he lies about Obama wanting to “return us to pre-9/11 defenselessness,” whatever the hell that means. Writing this column, and contemplating the possibility that more Muslims will not be killed, apparently sent Krauthammer into an emotional tailspin, because he finishes by stating that Obama’s radical pacifism is “enough to make you weep.”
This is the guy considered by Villagers to be a particularly “sophisticated” critic of Obama.