War & Peace Quote by Charles Krauthammer

Krauthammer’s move here is less about praising an enemy than shaming an audience. He takes aim at a post-attack reflex common in American political speech: downgrade the attacker into a moral caricature ("cowards", "senseless") and treat the outrage as a substitute for strategy. Calling that reflex "complacent nonsense" is deliberate provocation. The insult is aimed inward, at leaders and commentators who, in his view, mistake catharsis for clarity.

The subtext is a warning about what language does to policy. "Cowards" frames violence as a failure of nerve; "senseless" frames it as irrational noise. Both terms, Krauthammer implies, let a society avoid the harder conclusion: these actors are purposeful, disciplined, and tactically adaptive. If you insist your adversary is beneath contempt, you may also deny that they can learn, plan, recruit, and win. He’s trying to force a rhetorical upgrade from moral condemnation to threat assessment.

Context matters: this argument sits squarely in the post-9/11 and post-Iraq-era debate over Islamist terrorism, where the stakes of naming were inseparable from the stakes of responding. His diction borrows from the register of conventional war ("enemy", "warriors"), nudging readers toward a military paradigm rather than a criminal-justice one. That choice is not neutral. It’s a bid to normalize harsher, more expansive countermeasures by reframing suicide attackers as soldiers rather than nihilists. The line works because it weaponizes realism: it dares you to admit competence in the enemy, then asks what you’re willing to do once you do.