Nationalism and its fruit — the powerful welfare/warfare nation-states that now infest virtually the entire planet — are the banes of the modern age. Their fundamental resources are violence and fraud, and their most indispensable fraud is the conviction they have inculcated in their subjects that the people’s very identity, the very essence of who they are, derives from and depends on the nation-state that dominates their lives.

I don't usually advocate military intervention, but I am aware of a country that would seem—by our government's standards—to desperately need it.

I’m not saying that bin Laden was anything but a dangerous enemy of this country’s, even though it was clear his influence was waning and his army shrinking. I’m saying that assassination of a political leader on foreign soil is a reprehensible practice and a moral trangression, and that’s why for three decades it was taken as a given in this country that it was impermissible and is more or less outlawed in international codes. And I’m saying that those who unblinkingly and reflexively approve of it with wild public demonstrations are guilty of the worst of patriotism, the last refuge of a scoundrel nation.