Over his twenty-five-year career of cheering on America’s foreign misadventures, he’s been a walking caricature of a giddy warmonger. Boundlessly generous with other people’s blood and treasure, ever eager for the next calamity, Boot seems hell-bent on refuting Irving Kristol’s description of neoconservatives as liberals who’ve been “mugged by reality.” Without Boot, there’d be nobody around to say, outright, that “America should be the world’s policeman”; to praise the U.S. occupation of the Philippines, with its 200,000 dead civilians, as a model for counterinsurgency; or to point out that the real problem with Obamacare is it may leave less money in the pot for blowing stuff up. Who else would complain, as Boot did in 2006, that Air Force General Curtis LeMay—a man who insisted that “there are no innocent civilians” and spent the Cold War trying “to get World War III started”—never got a Nobel Peace Prize? If Boot wasn’t so guileless and earnest, you’d suspect him of engaging in an elaborate, decades-long put-on to “own the doves.”
https://isi.org/modern-age/boot-and-rally/
