Here, Charles Krauthammer magically turns the man who escalated the war in Afghanistan, expanded international drone strikes, and killed Osama bin Laden into a drag queen who refuses to fight.
Nice trick, that.
But I'd like to call attention to something Krauthammer writes in his column:
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, 12 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.
John F. Kennedy summoned the nation to bear the burdens of the long twilight struggle. Obama, agonizing publicly about the awful burdens of command — his command, which he twice sought in election — wants out. For him and for us.
Declaring the Cold War over in 1958 would've been preferable to the Kennedy administration placing Jupiter nuclear missiles in Turkey in 1961, which was what spawned the Cuban Missile Crisis and nearly triggered a nuclear war. Declaring the Cold War over in 1958 would've also been preferable to committing troops to Vietnam, a war that cost 60,000 American lives, killed about 500,000 Vietnamese, and damaged the reputation of the United States internationally and among its citizens, and weakened us abroad.
But when Kennedy said in his first inaugural that the United States would "bear any burden," the highest tax rates on the wealthiest Americans was over 70 percent, and there was a draft.
So my question is, does Krauthammer favor returning to those policies to fight his half-century "War on Terror," and if not, who does he expect to fight it and pay for it?
