Let’s say you have just invaded a country rich in a strategic resource, like oil. If you were building an empire, would you appoint some pliant local despot and establish a national concern, along the lines of the East India Company, to extract wealth from the invaded land? Or would you encourage an election that empowers a confessional party with close ties to a stated enemy, like Iran, and instruct your diplomats to press the new parliament to pass legislation sharing the profits of the state-owned concession equitably with the citizens of the country you’ve just invaded?

Most empires go with the first option. President Bush went with the second. The decision to topple Saddam Hussein may be many things, but imperialist is not one of them. But the neocon as imperialist is a key portion of the thesis of Matthew Yglesias’s new book, “Heads in the Sand” (John Wiley & Sons, 252 pages, $25.95). In the process of making the case for what he insists is “liberal internationalism,” he calls its neoconservative alternative “hegemonism,” and describes it as a return to the militant nationalism of a bygone era.

He asserts further that neoconservatives, because they favor military action not approved by the U.N. Security Council, are weakening the very institution whose strength is required to preserve a liberal international order. To his credit, Mr. Yglesias does acknowledge that the United Nations fails at times to enforce “nominal prohibitions on various abuses,” a wonderful phrase that apparently covers attempted genocide, deliberate malnutrition, and nuclear proliferation.

The centerpiece of his argument is, unsurprisingly, the war in Iraq. “The Saddam Hussein situation was under control, and sanctions, no fly zones, and inspections were weakening his regime,” he writes, after quoting a similar sentiment from Senator Kerry in a 2004 debate with Mr. Bush. This is a common mistake, built on the fact that the inspectors tasked with finding stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq did not find them. But the final Iraq Survey Group report also says that Iraq’s tyrant retained the ability and will to restart — within weeks — at least his chemical and biological weapons programs, once sanctions were lifted.

On one point, “Heads in the Sand” stands out among much of the contemporary left-liberal criticism of the current war. Writers such as Glenn Greenwald, Robert Dreyfuss, and Sidney Blumenthal have lingered on a story that has neoconservatives deliberately deceiving the rest of the Bush administration in the run-up to war. Mr. Yglesias at times mouths this net-left shibboleth (he calls the neoconservatives “fantasists,” for example). But the author spends a chunk of his book unpacking what he sees as the flaws in Clinton-era foreign policy, and he certainly doesn’t let his party’s hawks off the hook by building his case on the lie that Democrats were lied to about Iraq.

In this respect the book is interesting, if not necessarily accurate. Mr. Yglesias dissects, for example, the inconsistencies in Mr. Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign position on the war ably. He notes that if his party’s nominee believed the war a distraction from the primary target of Al Qaeda, then why would Mr. Kerry insist that the war’s implementation was its biggest fault and not just renounce his vote authorizing the debacle in 2003?

Mr. Yglesias argues that Mr. Kerry might have won the 2004 general election if he had come out against the Iraq war, as Governor Dean had. But in making this argument, he does not present any polling data to back it up. It’s possible. But there were myriad reasons for Mr. Kerry’s defeat.

The book’s principal advice for Democrats today is to embrace a hasty exit from Iraq. Mr. Yglesias believes a military withdrawal will ultimately deprive Al Qaeda and other terrorists of important propaganda they use to replenish ranks. He writes that America as a general rule should seek to resolve conflicts that fuel jihadist rage.

All of this will be very persuasive to readers who prattle on about things like “the politics of fear,” or worry that the “right-wing noise machine” is demonizing Iran’s leaders. More discerning readers, however, will notice that the book misreads our pious and depraved enemies.

Mr. Yglesias portrays Al Qaeda’s war principally as a defensive jihad, or a reaction to the presence of occupying forces on Muslim lands. He believes therefore that the correct way to starve the terrorists of new recruits is to reduce America’s troop presence in the region. To bolster this case, Mr. Yglesias summons scholar Robert Pape’s study of suicide attacks, which finds that the vast majority of such events are launched in response to the presence of foreign soldiers.

That is true, insofar as Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas cloak their barbarism in a mid-20th-century anti-colonialist rhetoric for Western audiences. But this analysis of modern Islamic terror fails to account for the imperial aims of the jihadists themselves. Osama bin Laden believes that his defensive jihad extends to what he calls “al-Andalus,” and what the United Nations recognizes as Spain.

Further, Mr. Yglesias overlooks that the vast majority of Al Qaeda’s victims adhere to the very faith this outfit claims to defend. This omission gets the young writer into some trouble. For example, in one of his many critiques of Thomas Friedman, Mr. Yglesias lampoons the New York Times columnist for suggesting after the 2005 elections that Sunni insurgents were not so much at war with America as they were with the Iraqi people. “Whatever else the insurgents of Iraq might be doing, they most certainly were fighting a war against the United States, and to imply otherwise was simply to mislead one’s readers,” he writes. “More to the point, ‘the Iraqi people’ did not have a side in the burgeoning conflict with Iraq, whose cause, after all, was precisely Iraq’s weak sense of national identity.”

Whatever else the insurgents might be doing is, however, the entire point. The slain leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, explicitly says in a letter captured in 2005 that he intends to foment a sectarian war between Shiites and Sunnis, by continuing his mega-terror campaign. Might an organization led by a Jordanian who had pledged fealty to a Saudi sheik based in Pakistan have something to do with Iraq’s “weak sense of national identity”?

Mr. Yglesias never adequately explains the goals of the enemy. It would be helpful to his thesis if the book at least considered the uses of terrorism in the Taliban’s campaign to win control of Afghanistan in the 1990s and to wrest control of the country today from the elected government of President Karzai. There is hardly any discussion of Hassan al-Turabi’s Sudan either, or, for that matter, Iran’s history of using terrorism to advance the emulation of a Shiite Islamic Republic in Lebanon.

Lacking this crucial context, Mr. Yglesias ends up arguing for American neutrality in the war between Islamic supremacists and the millions of Muslims who live in territory that long ago comprised a lost caliphate. He writes that “the Bush administration actively assisted the government of Ethiopia in its effort to invade and conquer Somalia in order to displace the Islamic Courts Movement that had been serving as that unhappy country’s de facto government,” and that, “in all these cases, the liberal alternative suggests that our main priority should be in the other direction. These conflicts are fundamentally political in nature, and it is their resolution that will undermine support for the global jihad movement.”

This proposition is itself backward, however. The legitimate transitional federal government in Mogadishu pleaded with Ethiopia to reverse what was a Shariah coup; thankfully, the Ethiopians complied. Today, a low-intensity conflict continues in Somalia, but the actual representatives of the “global jihad movement” are in hiding and far weaker.

In the face of such aggression, Mr. Yglesias counsels his party against choosing a side. That’s not so much liberal internationalism as it is illiberal provincialism. Woe to the Democrat who can’t figure out the difference.

elake@nysun.com