Richard A. Clarke. Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror. 2004.

I never would have believed I'd miss Bill Clinton, but, damnit, I miss Clinton. One of the worst things I thought he did at during his presidency was to fire a bunch of missiles at someone named Osama bin Laden (blowing up a medicine factory in the Sudan). Of course, now, that doesn't seem quite as silly as it did then. That happened, you may recall, when Wag the Dog was still in theaters, and Danielle Chynoweth and I went to see it in New York and afterward passed out leaflets denouncing Clinton, striking up an argument with a trio of Zionists. But, as Clarke points out with devastating poignancy, nobody has accused Bush of playing Wag the Dog by attacking Iraq ostensibly in retribution for September 11th, which move addresses the problem of terrorism by making terrorism exponentially worse—"like hitting a ball of quicksilver with a hammer"—and by taking troops and funds away from securing the homeland.

But back to Clinton: it wasn't his idea to fire missiles at Afghanistan and the Sudan—that was the initiative of his dedicated counter-terrorism team—Clinton just went along with it even though he knew he would be accused by people like Danielle and myself of trying to divert attention from his boring sex scandal. On p.243 we see a clear contrast between Bush, who goes to bed at 10 P.M., and will not speak to anybody but flunkies and yes-men, and Clinton, who stays up until 2 A.M. working, frequently speaks directly to low-level staff, and, after exhausting their knowledge, even will call up professors or news networks to get more information on topics that concern him. Bush may or may not be capable of passing English 101, while Clinton at one point reads an entire Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel in one night before it is even published—because apparently the most powerful man in the world has ways of getting his hands on galleys. Other clarifications Clarke offers on rumors circulating in left-wing circles include: April Glaspie neither invited nor expected Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait, the U.S. did not sell arms to Saddam Hussein as such (but used Saudi and Egyptian intermediaries—which amounts to the same thing). Clarke is reputable to the max, but not reducible. He protested Vietnam, but, as a career bureaucrat, advocated invading Iraq (but not after September 11), and mentions in passing without explanation that the U.S. should not have agreed to the Kyoto Protocol or the International Criminal Court. HEY RICHARD CLARKE, WTF? PLEASE EMAIL ME TO EXPLAIN THIS LAST PART.

Skip to page 247 for the heart of the book, and some of the most credible Bush-bashing you'll ever read, even better than The Price of Loyalty.