Hands Off Thucydides!

Henry Farrell gets medieval on a pet peeve of mine: neoimperialists invoking Thucydides. I'm not a big fan of our pundit Blavatskys who tell us that the dead would be on their side of some contemporary controversy. Orwell gets this the most of course. But if I was going to pick a historical figure supportive of democratic imperialism and the remote social engineering implied in transforming the Islamic world into a swarthier Kansas, then Thucydides would be absolutely the last on any list.