Appearing on Fox News Tuesday night, columnist Charles Krauthammer took Secretary of State John Kerry to task over his recent claims that the biggest mistake the U.S. could make is to blame all Muslims for the transgressions of radicals within the religion. Krauthammer told host Bret Baier that, instead, the biggest mistake would be “to lose the damn war” by refusing “to recognize who the enemy is and what it requires.”
The conservative commentator also blamed President Obama’s “strategy” for the condition of the Middle East, calling what has happened in the region “the fruits of withdrawal.”
KRAUTHAMMER: The biggest error that we can make, while it would be an error if we blamed all of the Muslims in the world for the crimes that are occurring, including the latest one today in Libya, for example. It would be an error but I’m not sure how many people in this country actually say that. I mean, that’s just a straw man. Everyone who is critical of radical Islam prefaces in saying of course it is a minority of Islam. It’s not a way to attack all Muslims. This is a non-argument that he is making. It wouldn’t be the biggest error that we make. The biggest error that we make is to lose the damn war because we refuse to recognize who the enemy is and what it requires. That would be a larger error because it would consign people to, for example, the hell that is Syria today or approaching a quarter of a million dead.
The original sin here is not that Obama sort of is confused. I think he is in a way, but that he has a strategy. He came into office with a strategy. America leaves. This is not something we should be involved in. We will leave and he didn’t quite understand, which is sort of an axiom of geopolitics, if America leaves the vacuum does not remain a vacuum. There’s a story on the front page on the Wall Street Journal about the comedy of errors of our supposedly equipping, arming and training the Syrian rebels. They started almost two years ago. They have gotten nowhere. There was no impetus, no urgency. There no logic behind what the president was doing. Everybody understood that he himself said and thought it was a fantasy. So he says it is a fantasy and says he is going to arm them. This is a president who believes in withdrawal and these are the fruits of withdrawal.