I was reading H.W. Brands's little biography of Woodrow Wilson last night. Since Bush often sounds so much like Wilson--and acts like him, too, in his willingness to send troops to countries to make them reform--I thought it would be useful to read up on Wilson.

Brands makes an interesting observation with some relevance to Bush. Brands describes Wilson as being almost wholly ignorant about foreign affairs when he became president. He had rarely traveled abroad. He was unconcerned with foreign affairs. He expected and wanted to be a domestic president. He famously said that it would be the height of irony if he found himself preoccupied wit foreign policy.

Sound familiar? But it gets better.

Brands says that in the absence of real knowledge about the world Wilson fell back on a kind of primitive moralizing as a guide to action.

This is downright scary in the parallel to Bush, isn't it?

The book came out in June 2003. So it is possible that Brands was deliberately intending his book as a warning about Bush. And the book is part of the series edited by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., so it wouldn't be surprising to discover that it included a subtle attack on Bush, whom Schlesinger openly disdains.

But all the same--hasn't Brands got a point worth pondering?