As it turns out, the editorial was misleadingly alluding to something Paul said a few days ago in Iowa, when he was talking about the Iraq War and his fears that we're headed for a war with Iran. "Just think of what happened after 9/11," Paul said. "Immediately before there was any assessment, there was glee in the administration because now we can invade Iraq. So the war drums beat." Contra Paul, I don't think it's fair to attribute "glee" to the Bush Administration. I presume even the most Machiavellian among its officials were horrified by the attacks. It is nevertheless true that longtime proponents of invading Iraq exploited 9/11 to urge a war. The Project for the New American Century is not a conspiracy theory. Nor are quotes like this one, spoken by Newt Gingrich on September 19, 2001: "If we don't use this as the moment to replace Saddam after we replace the Taliban, we are setting the stage for disaster."

Vice President Dick Cheney certainly felt the same way.

Conservatives in general and National Review in particular are perfectly within their rights to find Paul's views about blow-back, non-interventionism, and the undue bellicosity of the establishment wrongheaded, and to argue against his libertarian take on foreign policy. In the editorial above, however, Paul's actual views are egregiously obscured, and the editors seem to reach the transparently absurd conclusion that the popularity his foreign policy message has found is grounded in a conspiracy theory about 9/11 rather than understandable disgust at the actual foreign policy decisions made in response to it.

The evasive treatment of Paul's views and popularity is of a piece with the general refusal among movement conservatives to logically rebut critiques of American foreign policy made by libertarians and paleocons. The crank card and the 9/11 card are often the extent of their response.

Dismissing the burgeoning number of Americans on the right who are suspicious of interventionism and hawkishness is intellectually suspect and unwise. A majority of Republicans now think that the Iraq War was a mistake. The general non-interventionist impulse on the right has never completely gone away. Paul is by no means the ideal vehicle for non-interventionism. But insofar as he plays a significant role in the GOP primary, it will be partly due to the fact that the legitimate concerns he articulates are taken up by no other viable candidate. One needn't be an ardent Paul supporter to suspect that National Review would rather that no viable GOP candidate spoke up to challenge the hawkish impulses on the elite right .

The conservative movement would rather ignore Paul on domestic issues too, for reasons that Ross Douthat identifies in a recent column. "Paul, for all his crankishness, is the kind of conservative that Tea Partiers want to believe themselves to be: Deeply principled, impressively consistent, a foe of big government in nearly all its forms (the Department of Defense very much included)," Douthat writes. "Gingrich, on the other hand, is the kind of conservative that liberals believe most Tea Partiers to be -- not a genuine 'don't tread on me' libertarian, but a partisan Republican whose unstinting support for George W. Bush's deficit spending morphed into hand-wringing horror of 'socialism' once a Democrat captured the Oval Office."