Preventive war became our national policy, which has not been any nation’s policy since Hitler. A preventive war is about as un-American as you get. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t done it before. The worst (previous) example was the Mexican War. That brave moralist, Ulysses S. Grant, who had been a second lieutenant just out of West Point, hated that war and said … that nations like individuals suffer for their transgressions. I believe the Civil War was the judgment of God on us for what we did to Mexico. God knows what we are going to get for Iraq.

–Gore Vidal