From Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace:

—On Iraq—

JUAN WILLIAMS: [E]verything is building to the point where not only are you getting memos coming from the Iraq study group, coming now from the Pentagon, from the Democrats in Congress — everybody’s saying we’ve got to find some way to pull these troops out, and yet you’re hearing the president still seemingly stuck. CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: [The Baker Report] will have a political impact and I think [the president will] ignore it. He’s a man who does. And he’s in his second term, at the end of his second term. He knows his legacy is Iraq. He doesn’t really care about how popular he is today. He cares about what history is going to say. And he doesn’t want to leave behind a catastrophe.
We know that it looks as if it’s a classic commission report, half Democrat, half Republican, looks like a consensus, the document splitting differences . . . and it’s not exactly the kind of advice you want when you have to make decisive new decisions in a war. . . .
PAUL GIGOT: I think the president’s . . . commitment of resolve this week in saying — wrapping his arms around Maliki and saying we’re going to be there with you is very important, because that’s the only way that we can, I think, get him to make the very difficult decisions that he has to make, whether it be taking on the insurgency or disarming the Shiite militias.
So I don’t think he has to announce some new grand strategy. The details in the Baker report suggest that there is no new grand strategy to be had. If there were some Hail Mary pass, some great ideas to be had, somebody would have thought of them before. Those ideas just don’t exist, and that’s why this is incremental.

—On Poison and Putin—

KRAUTHAMMER: People are talking about that this is a great mystery. It’s not a mystery. You think it was rogue elements who poisoned the president of Ukraine in that election, or rogue elements who shot the . . . Russian journalist who was looking into the war in Chechnya, or a crazed Turk with Bulgarian associations who shot the pope on his own? The Russians have a long and distinguished history of political assassination, and this is an obvious example of it.
WALLACE: Has this president, has this administration, fundamentally misjudged Putin?
KRAUTHAMMER: I think it has, at least in the beginning, assuming he was a democrat. He’s not. He’s an autocrat. He’s an authoritarian. He’s centralizing power and dismantling his democracy. That’s what’s happening in Russia. It’s not stoppable. It’s not something that America or any other country is going to actually influence. It’s a fact of life. . . .
And the fact is that we’re going to need Russia, particularly on Iran and on issues in the Middle East. It can help us. It’s a ruthless dictatorship which acts in its interest. It may act in its interest in helping us on Iran.
And we are not going to allow, I think, one way or the other, this assassination to interfere with our relations. Look, assassinations are never traceable. State assassinations are always — there are cutouts. They have a lot of experience here.
No one ever got Stalin on the assassination of Trotsky. It doesn’t happen. It won’t stop at his doorstep. Putin will not be implicated. And we will deal with him like any other dictator whom we need.