Tucker Carlson warned on his Fox News program Friday night: “Washington has wanted war with Iran for decades. They still want it now. Let’s hope they haven’t finally gotten it.”
This was part of Carlson’s first broadcast in the wake of learning that the Trump administration ordered a U.S. airstrike near Baghdad’s airport, killing Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani.
Carlson criticized President Trump’s latest major foreign policy decision, and it was arguably the most important television commentary on the subject.
“No one in Washington is in the mood for big-picture questions right now,” Carlson continued Friday night. “Questions like: Is Iran really the greatest threat we face? And who’s actually benefiting from this? And why are we continuing to ignore the decline of our country in favor of jumping into another pointless quagmire, from which there’s no obvious exit?”
These are the kinds of questions many today wished had been considered more carefully, or at all, before the United States decided to invade Iraq in 2003.
They certainly weren’t asked much on Fox News at the time. The conservative news giant and its pundits were consistent defenders of President George W. Bush and his foreign policy.
If not for Carlson’s presence Friday night, nothing would have changed. The Daily Beast reported, “Carlson was one of the only major figures on Fox News to criticize Soleimani’s killing. Fox News hosts Sean Hannity, Pete Hegseth, and the hosts of Fox & Friends all praised the move.” Not surprisingly, many of the same neoconservatives and hawks who thought the Iraq War was wise were ecstatic about Trump’s latest move, some even doing their cheering on Fox News over the weekend.
It was like they were putting the Bush band back together.
An antiwar-leaning conservative like Carlson is hard to imagine existing at all on Fox News around 2005. Thankfully, in 2019, he ended the year as the channel’s second-most popular show after Hannity.
CNN’s Brian Stelter, usually a critic of conservatives, praised Carlson, saying, “He burst the propaganda bubble on Fox with a really clear anti-war stance.”
“We know that in the past, Tucker has been persuasive with President Trump,” Stelter said. “Right now, though, it seems Trump is listening to Sean Hannity and others on Fox who are urging him to show what they call strength in the region.”
Left-leaning pundits on CNN or MSNBC certainly don’t influence Trump, but even if they did, their criticisms of the president are more partisan outburst than serious observations about war, peace, and our role on the global stage.
No one in prime-time television punditry does this better right now than Carlson.
Progressive journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted after watching Carlson’s Friday monologue, “Here’s Tucker Carlson — whether you like it or not — offering some of the most vehement & unflinching denunciations of Trump’s assassination attack on Iran of anyone in the media: the kind of #Resistance which Dem outlets largely failed to offer for Obama.”
Here’s Tucker Carlson — whether you like it or not — offering some of the most vehement & unflinching denunciations of Trump’s assassination attack on Iran of anyone in the media: the kind of #Resistance which Dem outlets largely failed to offer for Obama https://t.co/58rX9gcCTc
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 4, 2020
Author and journalist Robert Wright shared a similar message with his nearly 34,000 Twitter followers. “I watched Tucker Carlson tonight. (Not a habit of mine.) Is there a single host on CNN or ‘liberal’ MSNBC who is as forthrightly against mindless U.S. militarism as he is? That’s a serious question — I don’t watch enough cable news to know. But I suspect the answer is no.”
I watched Tucker Carlson tonight. (Not a habit of mine.) Is there a single host on CNN or “liberal” MSNBC who is as forthrightly against mindless US militarism as he is? That’s a serious question–I don’t watch enough cable news to know. But I suspect the answer is no.
— Robert Wright (@robertwrighter) January 4, 2020
There is no more powerful news voice against mindless militarism right now than Carlson, and he’s doing it on the channel that has had the reputation of being the most militaristic. There’s nothing coming out of CNN or MSNBC that even compares.
Most importantly, Tucker Carlson is asking all the right questions about arguably the most important issue any country can face: war. And he’s doing it in front of an audience that had been mostly impervious to those questions in the past.
It’s true that “Washington has wanted war with Iran for decades.” Today, at least one voice at Fox News is determined not to give it to them. Perhaps just as importantly, he is committed to explaining to conservatives why they shouldn’t want another war in the first place.
Jack Hunter (@jackhunter74) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the former political editor of Rare and co-authored the 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington with Sen. Rand Paul.
