And by the way, the “Department of Peace” already exists. It’s called the “U.S. Department of State”. ~Kos

It’s a tough call, and I can’t claim to know the man’s entire “corpus,” but this is perhaps the most idiotic thing Kos has written.  There are plenty of reasons for mocking a Department of Peace, whether it is proposed by Dennis Kucinich (a respectable antiwar Congressman who was assuredly the worst mayor of Cleveland ever) or Max Boot (a neo-imperialist hack of no great distinction), who has written:

An urgent priority is to create a Department of Peace to match the capabilities of our Department of War (a.k.a. the Department of Defense). We’ve gotten very good at conventional military operations, such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but we’re very weak when it comes to rebuilding war-torn societies. Admittedly this is a difficult job for anyone, but we make it all the harder because of a lack of institutional capacity. Neither the Pentagon nor the State Department nor the U.S. Agency for International Development is really geared up for this important assignment. The result is that much of the burden is unfairly placed on our men and women in uniform.

In other words, it’s hard to be imperialistic when you don’t have the right kind of agencies to build imperial administration, er, nations.  However, as easy as it is to mock Dept. of Peace proposals, which ought to horrify everyone with the Orwellian creepiness of having a government department dedicated to such a noble and high goal (can’t you just picture a Department of Freedom or Department of Love or a Department of Happiness coming soon after Peace?) for which government is uniquely unsuited to realise, Kos’ statement is infinitely more foolish.  First of all, it buys into Foggy Bottom’s self-presented image as the vehicle of reasonable and just foreign policy, when that is exactly what State is not.  State is presently just another means that internationalists and hegemonists wish to use to project power and meddle in the affairs of other countries.  It is not the preferred department of neocons because their methods of power projection involve the blunt (invasion) and the hamfisted (bombing), but that simply means that the meddlesome interventionists at State are not quite as dense as the neocons.  They actually want to make sure that U.S. hegemony endures and doesn’t flame out in some glorious failure of a misguided war–they are, if anything, more threatening to the legitimate “America First”-style national interest because they can pose as being far more reasonable and because they are far more subtle in advancing their goals.  The State Department is, I’m sorry to say, a department full of busybodies who make their business every year–as mandated by Congress–to sit in judgement over every other nation on earth and rate their human rights progress and their freedom of religion and so forth, which creates tremendous resentment against the presumption of our government.  As small and relatively weak as their department is it possesses disproportionate clout abroad because it is perceived to be the reasonable and accommodating face of American government.  They represent the scalpels of empire where the Pentagon represents the sledgehammers, but their goals are the same, and their goals are certainly not peace in any sense that I or Kos would understand.