The United States has a recent history of going to war for dubious reasons promoted by interested groups, for which afterwards Americans are sorry. I have in mind the controversial Tonkin Gulf incident that was used to justify large-scale U.S. intervention in Vietnam. The search for nonexistent mass destruction weapons that prompted the invasion of Iraq. Now we have a threat of war with Russia to save an American-sponsored coup d'état in Ukraine.

This seems the work of officials closely associated with the Project for a New American Century. This organization, since 1997, has assembled virtually all of the neoconservative foreign policy specialists, publicists and commentators who have lost their places in or around the U.S. government since the United States' military and political fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It seems odd that they have found that home in the Obama administration, customarily attacked as liberal. In foreign policy, it is not. Its liberal members are mostly from the liberal-interventionist school, anxious to go to war to save people from tyranny and despotism — good causes, but not always prudent, and less often successful.