In his post below, Justin Logan outlines some of Max Boot’s howlers on Iraq, and asks: “why should anyone be listening to him now?” It’s a good question. However, I think Boot serves a useful function. If you find yourself arguing that neoconservatives are empire-hungry, war-mad, and contemptuous of civil liberties–and your opponent accuses of you of setting up a straw man–point him to Boot. He’s the real deal. 

As Justin noted, here’s Boot making “the Case for American Empire.” And here he is telling us that “Empire” is the right term:

“No need to run away from the label,” argues Max Boot, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York: “America’s destiny is to police the world.” 

Here’s Boot offering America’s occupation of the Philippines–with its 200,000 dead civilians–as a success, and as reason for hope that Iraq will be a success as well. Here he is suggesting that China may be looking into “creating man-made earthquakes” as a way of fighting an asymmetric war against the United States. (There’s a threat to keep you up nights.) So threatening is the world we live in, in fact, that it’s time to “Forget privacy, we need to spy more.”

But for classic Boot, you can’t beat this LA Times column from last summer, in which he declares that General Curtis LeMay was one of the “greatest peacemakers in modern history,” a proper candidate for a Nobel Peace Prize. It’s an odd choice.

As head of the air war in Japan during WWII, LeMay ordered the firebombing of Tokyo, which killed 100,000 civilians; as well as the bluntly named “Operation Starvation” designed to destroy Japanese food supplies. “I suppose if I had lost the war I would have been tried as a war criminal,” LeMay said later.

Well, “they” started it, some will say. But if deliberately killing large numbers of civilians doesn’t disqualify one from “peacemaker” status, then how about trying to start a nuclear war? As head of Strategic Air Command in the ’50s, it was LeMay’s view that the United States should strike the Soviet Union while America retained nuclear superiority. If the weak-willed civilians wouldn’t sanction preventive war, he hoped to provoke an incident that would allow him to deliver his “Sunday Punch,” unleashing the U.S. nuclear arsenal and causing an estimated 60 million Russian dead. Without authorization, in 1954 he ordered B‑45 overflights of the Soviet Union, commenting to his aides, “Well, maybe if we do this overflight right, we can get World War III started.”

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, LeMay repeatedly challenged President Kennedy’s courage, urging him to approve airstrikes. That action might well have led to the nuclear exchange LeMay dreamed of. All in all, it’s not surprising that some people identify LeMay as the model for General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, a movie that according to Fred Kaplan, author of Wizards of Armageddon, got a little too close to the truth for comedy.

In the column linked above, “Messed up Are the Peacemakers,” Boot suggests that modern-day peace activists have questionable priorities and bizarre affections. Maybe so. But he’s hardly in a position to criticize them.