War & Peace Quote by Charles Krauthammer

Krauthammer frames the pre-Iraq War argument as an exercise in cold arithmetic, not conscience: “doves” aren’t objecting because war is wrong, but because it might be a bad bet. That choice of language is doing work. “Doves” is a faintly patronizing piece of Washington zoology, a label that shrinks a coalition of skeptics into a temperamental type. It implies caution as personality, not principle, and it quietly flatters the speaker as the adult in the room, the one weighing “risks” and “gains” with clinical sobriety.

The subtext is a clever containment strategy. By conceding that Iraq “could be very costly,” Krauthammer inoculates himself against charges of cheerleading while keeping the debate on his home turf: cost-benefit, not legitimacy, not international law, not the moral hazard of preventive war. Even “possibly degenerating into urban warfare” is a loaded phrasing. “Degenerating” suggests a war that starts clean and modern, then degrades into something messy and undignified - street-by-street chaos that erases the fantasy of precision. It’s a warning, but also a way of defining the “serious” objection: not that invading is unjust, but that it may be tactically inconvenient.

Context matters: early-2000s pundit culture prized posture as much as proof. This sentence reads like an invitation to the hawkish reader: yes, the downside is real, but the only relevant question is whether the gains justify it. Everything else gets politely ruled out of bounds.