FNC contributor Charles Krauthammer reacted to Syrian President's Bashar al-Assad's nearly hour long interview with Fox Wednesday on "Special Report."
Krauthammer said his opinion of Assad as a simple and stupid leader was upended by the interview in which the Syrian president came across a soft spoken and empathetic leader simply defending his nation from jihadis.
However, "not one word" that came out of his mouth was true, Krauthammer said.
The height of his hypocrisy, according to Krauthammer, came when the Syrian president decried extremists infiltrating Syria who he actually created by supporting Al Qaeda in Iraq:
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Bashar al-Assad has a reputation, has had for over a decade that he has been in power for being simple and stupid as opposed to the father who was a wily dictator. I think if you watched him for the last hour you would have to conclude the exact opposite. He is very smart, extremely sophisticated and one of the great liars of all time. He spoke for almost an hour. I don't think there was a true word in anything he said including and and but. I will give you two examples. One is he talked about the terrorists as being sort of at the start of the war, the reason he began the war, the reason he has leveled all the cities it began as a demonstration of school children in Daraa who he then tortured. It remained a popular uprising for at least a year before any of the so-called terrorists arrived. And secondly when you watch him and you get the sense of this sincerity and the warmth of the softness of the voice of a guy who cares about how the terrible terrorists, meaning the Al Qaeda types, the jihadists have come into his country and infiltrated it with a terrible ideology. Assad is the guy who created and supported Al Qaeda in Iraq after America entered Iraq. He was the one who channeled all of these elements who we now decry so sincerely in order to go into Anbar, into Iraq and to kill Americans. So he is getting the blowback of the people he invited and with whom he was completely comfortable as long as the task was to kill Americans. But, look at his success, how smart he is, we are sitting with him for an hour, treating him like a great statesman a month after he ordered an entirely criminal chemical weapons attack which killed 1500 of his people and he did it without any qualms whatsoever. I say is he a brilliant diplomat and a war criminal at the same time.