Charles Krauthammer can be seen most nights on Fox’s Special Report with Bret Bair. He qualifies as one of the most significant of the Obama administration’s opponents. Politico’s Ben Smith proclaimed the commentator to be “a coherent, sophisticated and implacable critic of the president” and a “central conservative voice” in the “Age of Obama.” New York Times mainstay David Brooks characterized him as “the most important conservative columnist right now.” In 2006, the Financial Times named Krauthammer the most influential commentator in America.
There is much to admire about the younger Charles Krauthammer. He was a Commonwealth scholar in politics at Balliol College Oxford, and later a graduate of Harvard Medical School. As a psychiatrist he discovered a variant of manic depression and co-authored an influential study on the epidemiology of mania. In the eighties, one of his articles in Time Magazine won him acclaim for introducing ‘The Reagan doctrine.’ His weekly column for the Washington Post won him the Pulitzer prize for commentary in 1987.
Unfortunately, the modern Charles Krauthammer is a markedly different proposition. The luminary of the contemporary conservative commentariat has a record of erroneous predictions and discredited analysis that stretches back to the turn of the millennium. When collated and assessed, the record is so egregious that it is hard to figure out why he is still held in such esteem.
When NATO, seeking to prevent another potential Balkan genocide, launched a bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999, Krauthammer argued that air strikes would be insufficient to force Milosevic out of Kosovo. Having denounced the move as mere wide-eyed liberal amateurism on the part of President Clinton, Krauthammer added a sarcastic note about Clinton playing golf in the midst of conflict (“The stresses of war, no doubt”). He seems to have changed his mind on the propriety of such stress-relief measures around 2002 or so.
Even after the Kosovo campaign proved successful, Krauthammer said that NATO involvement “would sever Kosovo from Serbian control and lead inevitably to an irredentist Kosovar state, unstable and unviable and forced to either join or take over pieces of neighboring countries.”
When an ethnic Albanian insurgency arose in Macedonia along its border with UN-administered Kosovo in 2001, he felt himself vindicated, announcing that “the Balkans are on the verge of another explosion,” making several references to Vietnam, and characterizing the continued presence of NATO forces in the region as a “quagmire.” The violence ended within the year, having claimed less than 80 lives. Kosovo has since joined both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Krauthammer was one of the leading boosters of the Iraq war. He argued in his February 1, 2002, Washington Post column that an invasion of Iraq would lead to the spread of democracy throughout the Middle East:
“Overthrowing neighbouring radical regimes shows the fragility of dictatorship, challenges the mullahs’ mandate from heaven and thus encourages disaffected Iranians to rise. First, Afghanistan to the east. Next, Iraq to the west”.
As the Iraq war got into full swing, Krauthammer ridiculed a New York Times article proposing that coalition forces might have to contend with guerrilla fighters in Iraq. He initially hailed the Iraq conflict as “the Three Week War”; and was sarcastically dismissive when those guerrillas whose existence he had found so improbable actually materialized. When U.S. reconstruction efforts were revealed to be amateurish, Krauthammer concluded a 2003 column with the suggestion that if, “in a year or two we are able to leave behind a stable, friendly government, we will have succeeded. If not, we will have failed. And all the geniuses will be vindicated.”
As the war dragged on, Krauthammer began a process of dissembling about the motivations for the Iraq war: “Our objectives in Iraq were twofold and always simple: Depose Saddam Hussein and replace his murderous regime with a self-sustaining, democratic government,” he said, now leaving the central argument made by the president and by the secretary of state at the U.N. about weapons of mass destruction out of his assessment.
A review of Krauthammer’s columns from 2002-2003 shows that he argued consistently that the risk of Saddam acquiring WMD and passing them on to terrorists was the reason for going to war, not the need to create democracy.
4/19/02: “Saddam survived, rearmed, defeated the inspections regime and is now back in the business of building weapons of mass destruction…Time is running short. Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. He is working on nuclear weapons. And he has every incentive to pass them on to terrorists who will use them against us. Given the nature of Hussein’s rule, destroying these weapons requires regime change.”
9/20/02: “The vice president, followed by the administration A Team and echoing the president, argues that we must remove from power an irrational dictator who has a history of aggression and mass murder, is driven by hatred of America and is developing weapons of mass destruction that could kill millions of Americans in a day. The Democrats respond with public skepticism, a raised eyebrow and the charge that the administration has yet to “make the case.” The threat of mass death on a scale never before seen residing in the hands of an unstable madman is intolerable – and must be preempted.”
In the wake of the invasion, Krauthammer’s tone began to change:
6/13/03: “The inability to find the weapons is indeed troubling, but only because it means that the weapons remain unaccounted for and might be in the wrong hands. The idea that our inability to thus far find the weapons proves that the threat was phony and hyped is simply false.”
Later, when the surge was proposed, Krauthammer came out against the idea, explaining in a 2007 column that it “will fail” due to the perfidy and incompetence of the Maliki government. He eventually deemed it a success and criticized those who predicted that it would be a failure. Krauthammer also claimed that President Bush was able to present Barack Obama with a war virtually won and that all Obama had to do was seal the deal.
Regarding Afghanistan, he would initially declare it “an astonishing success” and Karzai a “deeply respected democrat.” As the Afghanistan war dragged on into President Obama’s administration, Krauthammer was asked if the president would end up giving General McChrystal the troops he wanted, or would change the war strategy, Krauthammer replied, “I think he doesn’t and McChrystal resigns.”
In reality, Obama did, and McChrystal didn’t.
Krauthammer has been delivering exasperated, portentous remarks about Iran being right on the cusp of a bomb for more than half a decade now. In Oct 2009 he gravely stated: “Our objective is to stop the enrichment. Unless it stops, they’re [Iran] going to have a bomb and they’re going to have it soon…” Two months later, he warned: “2010 will be the year of Iran. Only three outcomes are possible. A: there’s going to be an Israeli strike; B: there’s going to be a revolution; or C: the Iranian regime will either acquire or come up to the threshold of becoming a nuclear power.” In May of 2010 he lamented “the total collapse of our nuclear policy with Iran.” In February of 2012, Bret Bair asked: “Will Israel strike Iran before the [2012 Presidential] election?” To which Krauthammer replied: “I think Israel will strike, because it cannot live under the threat of annihilation from Iran.”
None of these predictions were accurate, and in retrospect, the rhetoric is agitated and alarmist.
When it came to early predictions about the 2008 Presidential race, Krauthammer suggested that should Obama run, “he will not win.” In the meantime, he said, the White House would probably go to a Republican, “say, 9/11 veteran Rudy Giuliani.” Krauthammer also warned that the “reflexive anti-war sentiments” of the left “will prove disastrous for the Democrats in the long run – the long run beginning as early as November ‘08.”
In the long run, of course, the Democrats won. During Obama’s first term as president, Krauthammer, On the PBS show Inside Washington, predicted that the U.S. Supreme Court would overturn the individual mandate provision of the Affordable Care Act: “I think the way it works is in the short run it will be a devastating defeat for the president, because his singular achievement will be shown by the Court to be unconstitutional”.
In the lead up to the 2012 election, Krauthammer speculated, “The fact is I think Romney does win in November, and the reason is it’s a pretty static race now, but it’s not going to be static forever, and the dynamic is the economy is weakening…”
On the eve of the election he predicted: “Romney, very close. But he’ll win the popular by I think about half a point, Electoral College probably a very narrow margin.” And for good measure he said: “I have every confidence he’s going to win in Florida, in North Carolina and Virginia”.
After Obama handily won the election, with virtually the same electoral college margin as in ’08, Krauthammer complained darkly about the President asserting himself in the new term. “This is entirely about politics. It’s phase two of the 2012 campaign. The election returned him to office. The fiscal cliff negotiations are designed to break the Republican opposition and grant him political supremacy, something he thinks he earned with his landslide 2.8-point victory margin on Election Day.”
Krauthammer’s sneering reference to Obama’s “landslide” overlooks the fact it was a more substantial win than either of George W. Bush’s, and Krauthammer never insisted that Bush practice restraint because of his narrow wins. Instead, he remarked of George W. Bush’s re-election: “The endorsement was resounding. First, his Electoral College victory was solid. He won comfortably. Second, there was the popular vote…If you have already won the electoral vote, it is okay to talk about the popular vote as a kind of adjunct legitimizer. And a 3.5 million vote margin is a serious majority. Knowing he will never again run for office, he is going to attempt several large things, most notably reforming Social Security…”
Obama’s near-5-million-vote margin was cause for sneering, and a reason why he shouldn’t push for the things he said he wanted to do during the campaign. Whereas George W. Bush’s 3.5-million-vote margin was “a serious majority”, giving him license to do things he never mentioned during the campaign, like try to privatize Social Security.
When the I.R.S issue surfaced, Krauthammer declared: “This thing is going to go on, and it could be fatal.”
When The Affordable Care Act was struggling early on, it was Krauthammer’s view that the prospect of Obamacare self-destructing and setting American Liberalism back at least a decade, “is more than likely.” Five months later, enrollments surpassed expectations.
More recently, Krauthammer castigated the President over the Ukraine situation: ‘The E.U dithers while Obama slumbers’. Krauthammer advocated “a serious loan/aid package, say, replacing Moscow’s $15 billion”, and urgent delivery of weapons in case the Russians advanced into Ukraine “as far as Kiev”. While a messy conflict ebbs and flows in the eastern Donetsk region, economically and geopolitically Putin looks compromised and unable to advance the situation, something Obama alluded to at the State of the Union.
On the Hugh Hewitt show, after explaining his professional aversion to diagnosing someone from afar, Krauthammer then promptly did so, labelling Obama ‘a narcissist.’ His castigation of the president became a little histrionic: “Count the number of times he uses the word I in any speech, and compare that to any other president. Remember when he announced the killing of bin Laden? That speech I believe had 29 references to I – on my command, I ordered, as commander-in-chief, I was then told, I this. You’d think he’d pulled the trigger out there in Abbottabad. You know, this is a guy, you look at every one of his speeches, even the way he introduces high officials – I’d like to introduce my secretary of State. He once referred to ‘my intelligence community’. And in one speech, I no longer remember it, ‘my military’. For God’s sake, he talks like the emperor, Napoleon…” This was the assessment that prompted Stephen Colbert to describe Krauthammer as “a bit of a dick.”
Charles Krauthammer has a terrible history of erroneous predictions and assessments, stretching back to the turn of the millennium. Nevertheless, many perceive him to be preternaturally authoritative, and give a lot of credence to his insights. As Nate Silver has said: “The thing that people associate with expertise, authoritativeness, kind of with a capital ‘A,’ don’t correlate very well with who’s actually good at making predictions.”
FROM: http://sheppardpost.com/
