News You Can Bruise for 2008 May 28

At an anonymous commenter's insistence, the last book I read was Charlie Wilson's War, an amazing and recommended trainwreck. Often I get a handle on a book I'm reading by imagining what would happen if the finished book were sent back to the time of the events it describes. And it would certainly have an effect, but the covert war described in this book is so complicated that I have no idea what that effect would be, besides the obvious ones like burning some intelligence resources.

I don't know what the movie does, but the stuff that you'd turn into a movie (Wilson's gallivanting around, mainly) is definitely the least interesting part of the book. I was riveted by the political wrangling and bureaucratic backstabbing and people getting screwed over for some poorly-defined national interest or logrolling or just to cover someone else's ass. I'm pretty sure I could tell where someone was trying to cover their ass in the book itself, but that's a sucker's game so I'm just not putting a lot of credit in the details. But the analytic conclusions were really interesting, especially as regards the way the catastrophic Contra proxy war ran interference for the Afghanistan proxy war.