Offers a series of essays analyzing the development of United States foreign policy and criticizing the country's role in the world, its intervention in other lands, and the domestic impact of such policies.

In Dreaming War, Vidal continues his defense of the American Republic by confronting the Cheney-Bush junta in a series of devastating essays that demolish the lies American Empire lives by. Vidal unveils a counter-history that traces the origins of America's current imperial ambitions to the experience of World War Two and the post-war Truman doctrine that gave us our National Security State. With the Cheney-Bush junta preparing us for a new hot war, Vidal asks whose interests are served by this doctrine of pre-emptive war? Was Afghanistan turned to rubble to avenge the 3,000 slaughtered on September 11? Or was "the unlovely Osama chosen on aesthetic grounds to be the frightening logo for our long contemplated invasion and conquest of Afghanistan?" And whatever happened to Osama? After all, he was abruptly replaced with Saddam Hussein once the Taliban were overthrown. And while "evidence" is now being invented to connect Saddam with 9/11, the current administration is not helped by "stories in the U.S. press about the vast oil wealth of Iraq which must--for the sake of the free world--be ressigned to U.S. consortiums." Vidal, asking questions about 9/11 and its aftermath that few dare raise, conjures up a vision of America in a vengeful mood, where the day of reckoning is rapturously endorsed in the traditionally anti-Semitic Christian rights's embrace of Israel. The Cheney-Bush enterprise is simply the latest installment in corporate America's Enemy-of-the-Month club, whose members Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Rice et al. are its latest, most lethal--and unconstitutional--exponents. Dreaming War contains previously unpublished material including the extended essay "Goat-Song."