TONY JONES: It was Thomas Hobbes that concluded if men do not hand over power to a state, to a leviathan as you've put it, their lives will be nasty, brutish and short.
The interesting thing here is that the neo-conservative thinker William Kristol took up Hobbes's argument.
His idea, though, of America as the leviathan was to make it a beacon for world peace.
In effect to replace the United Nations.
You've set out some of what's wrong with that but why was that such a compelling argument for the neo-conservatives and why did it resonate with George Bush in the end?
DR PETER SINGER: I think it really helps, you know, if you live in America to experience this.
That's what I've noticed over the five years since I've come here from Australia.
You get to see the view that many Americans have of America, that it's just such a wonderful nation, that it was, like, the first democracy, people sometimes almost think it has invented democracy which of course it didn't.
And that has this mission in the world to promote democracy.
I think that people like William Kristol and also other people in the Bush Administration, Paul Wolfowitz for example, had this vision that democracy was such an obvious good that if they went into Iraq their troops would be greeted with flowers and everyone would say, "Oh at last, great, we can set up a democracy and it will be easy to do."
I think they must all be very puzzled and I hope very humbled at the fact that a year after they succeeded in toppling Saddam there is, you know, something that's really close to a civil war and the Americans, instead of being treated as liberators, are being seen as an army of occupation.
But it's because of that illusion about how wonderful America is I think that they were able to deceive themselves into thinking that this was going to be an easy thing to do.
