Aging & Wisdom Quote by Charles Krauthammer

Krauthammer’s line is a tidy piece of post-9/11 intellectual machinery: it turns an argument about choice into an argument about time. “I happen to believe” feigns modesty, but it’s a rhetorical softener that lets him sound reasonable while advancing a maximal claim. The real engine is the phrase “will only grow with time” - a one-way ratchet that converts uncertainty into inevitability. If risk is guaranteed to worsen, delay becomes its own moral failure, and preemption stops looking like aggression and starts looking like responsibility.

The subtext is less about Saddam Hussein than about America’s tolerance for ambiguity. The “preemption school” borrows the aura of strategic doctrine, implying there are sober experts on one side and naïve appeasers on the other. It’s also a move to launder speculation (“acquire his weapons”) into a forward-leaning certainty: we don’t need proof of an existing threat if we can claim a future one that’s perpetually ripening.

Context does the rest. In the early 2000s, the trauma of surprise attack made “waiting” feel decadent, even suicidal. The public argument wasn’t just about Iraq’s capabilities; it was about whether the U.S. could afford to be wrong again. Krauthammer’s sentence exploits that pressure point: it invites readers to imagine the worst-case scenario and then treats imagination as a policy input more reliable than inspection regimes, alliances, or containment. The brilliance - and danger - is how it reframes war as risk management, with fear as the preferred metric.