has been enhanced, and that prospects of world peace have been improved by American intervention in four wars in half a century. Intervention began with deceit by McKinley; it ends with deceit by Roosevelt and Truman. Perhaps we would have a rational foreign policy…if Americans could be brought to realize that the first necessity is the renunciation of the lie as an instrument of foreign policy.

With the advent of National Review, these increasingly isolated voices would be silenced and marginalized. Even the heroic John T. Flynn, whose anti-FDR biography The Roosevelt Myth had reached number two on the New York Times bestseller list, was turned away from National Review when he tried to warn of the dangers of a policy of military interventionism.

Why did Murray oppose war? Hereportrayed as evidence of the incorrigible wickedness of the private sector.

But when the United States government launches indefensible wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, spreading death, destruction, and dislocation to an extraordinary number of people, there is some anger, to be sure, among opponents of the policy. Yet even most opponents of the war stop short of drawing sweeping conclusions from this about the nature of the state. They remain in thrall to what they learned in high school civics, where the state is described as a great and progressive institution. Not even the horrors of war cause them to revisit this crippling assumption. And the next time they’re on an airplane, they’ll applaud the soldiers who fought in that very war. (Would they, by the way, applaud soldiers