Richard Clarke's book Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror is not a new book (see listing in the booklist on the sidebar, under 2004), but worth reading all the same. Clarke was a major player in defense and intelligence matters in a series of administrations, from Reagan's to the second Bush's. In this book he lays out, from his perspective, what we did right and what we did wrong in those years. As in his more recent 2008 book Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disaster, he is not happy with how our government is running.
What I took away from this book is (1) how insular and parochial the FBI and the CIA have been, to the serious detriment of our nation, and (2) how often the private manias or prejudices of a few key people bias and distort our national policy.
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