Sunday, February 28, 2010

Charles Krauthammer: The war on terror is over

Charles Krauthammer, a Washington Post columnist and prominent neoconservative -- or do I repeat myself -- is a smug and dependable advocate of empire, one who doesn't apologize for the sins that inevitably come with occupying foreign lands for years, decades, but one who revels in them, and indeed wishes to see them be fruitful and multiply. Clearly viewing himself as a towering intellectual force, Krauthammer can always be counted to defend the worst excesses of America's imperial adventures, from indefinite detention and torture to drone strikes and illegal war. No peacenik, he regularly takes to the Sunday morning talk shows and Op-Ed pages in a courageous battle in the propaganda war against the terrorists, so when a man of his caliber, who has never met a war he didn't like (from afar, always from afar), says the war on terror is over, I think it deserves some attention.

While searching though the archive of Krauthammer's columns from 2001 for another post -- and because I clearly have some sort of sick, masochistic desire to spend Sunday mornings reading eight year old editorials on the need to invade Iraq lest the victims of 9/11 die in vain -- I came across this pronouncement contained in a typically self-important piece laying out a checklist of countries real men like Charles Krauthammer would bomb:
The war on terrorism will conclude in Baghdad. How? No one knows. All we do know is that history, cunning and cruel, will demand that if this president wants victory in the war he has declared, he will have to achieve it on the very spot where his own father, 10 years ago, let victory slip away.
Despite emerging "victorious" in Iraq, as Krauthammer has taken great lengths to tell us, there always seems to emerge just one more country begging for a little liberation-by-bombing, just one more Hitler-in-the-making that needs taking out by America's armed forces, which is something to be expected when one's view of the world is formed by the ideological equivalent of a hall of mirrors -- my god, is that a WMD, or worse, a Muslim in the corner?! -- and you get paid by the Neville Chamberlain reference.

6 comments:

  1. "victorious" in Iraq ~ maybe it's because we've managed to blanket the country with 'enduring' bases. Nothing permanent you understand.

    I'm sure controlling the flow of oil had nothing to do with the "victoriousness" krauthammer boasts of.

    Then there's Afghanistan. But that's another country we're ridding of 'terrorists.' Doesn't seem to be finished there ~ And have you seen the number of bases there? alternet says 700!!

    Aren't we 'liberation bombing' in Pakistan, Yemen with Iran on the horizon?

    If Krauthammer ever woke up and looked at himself in the mirror....

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  2. Anonymous12:01 PM

    Chuckie the Kraut-Hammer lives a life guided by victimhood. As a Zionist who is restricted to a wheelchair, he has plenty of hatred seething within him.

    He is the classic stereotypical grown-up version of the kid who was mocked with "Kick Me!" signs in school, the kid who had his books pushed out from under his arm in the stairwell. He hates everything around him and sees the only way to feel safe as being powerful, murderous and punitive toward all with whom he disagrees -- and that's a huge portion of humanity there.

    If there's a more bitter columnist working today, I'd like to hear about it.

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  3. It's true: more so than even the smug self-importance and faux-intellectualism, what's most striking about your typical Krauthammer column is the seething bitterness it displays.

    Now, bitterness is a completely understandable reaction to the world we live in, don't get me wrong, but most people can find ways of coping that don't involve bombing and embittering someone else.

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  4. Anonymous11:29 AM

    Roger that.

    Probably safe to say that what makes Chuckles the Kraut-Hammer bitter is what makes most of us feel good. And vice versa too, of course.

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  5. Charlie, why do you hate America? Would you at least agree that “[t]he fighting, death and destruction in Gaza is painful to watch. But it’s all too familiar. It’s the latest version of the longest-running play in the modern Middle East, which, if I were to give it a title, would be called: “Who owns this hotel? Can the Jews have a room? And shouldn’t we blow up the bar and replace it with a mosque?”

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  6. Why do I hate America? Well, Charles Krauthammer and Tom Friedman, for starters.

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