Michael Howard argues that democracies actually are more inclined to go to war

After
years of hearing how democracies are inclined to be
peaceable, I
was surprised to read this in Sir Michael Howard's War
and the Liberal Conscience:

Democracies,
from France at the end of the eighteenth century to the United States in the
middle of the twentieth, have failed to live up to the expectations of
eighteenth-century liberal thinkers. On the contrary they have repeatedly
displayed a bellicose passion reminiscent of the worst years of the Wars of
Religion....The doctrine that peoples if left to themselves are naturally
peaceable, like its converse that they are naturally belligerent, begs far more
questions than it answers.