Bear Left!: Pax Americana Excerpts:

An American strategy of preemption only invites countries in the world's tinderboxes to act likewise. It is hardly coincidental that critics of the new strategy now include some of the most renowned scholars of international relations.

The Bush administration has a number of critics, including academic critics, who warn about the costs of a war with Iraq in terms of human suffering or moral necessity. But these scholars go further: they criticize the war as being a bad idea on its own terms. None of the signers are pacifists; indeed, many supported the Persian Gulf War a decade ago because Iraq then posed a real threat to the United States.

In the summer of 2001, in the journal Foreign Policy, Jeffrey Legro and Andrew Moravcsik described the lack of intellectual underpinnings in the Bush administration's foreign policy.

Among the very few academics advising the Bush administration is Donald Kagan, a notoriously conservative professor at Yale University (GD - Skull & Bones alert), not of political science or international relations or of security studies, but of Greek history. Does he recall how history judged Sparta?