Some very interesting stuff in a very long New York magazine piece by the superbly talented Jennifer Senior about Bill Clinton and how he’s living these days. Some highlights:

“As a rule, he refuses to bluntly criticize George W. Bush, whose political skills he considers ‘extraordinary’ and whose father he genuinely likes. When I ask whether he enjoys playing good cop around the world to George W.’s bad cop, he punts, saying, ‘It’s not true that people dislike W. all over the world. In Russia, they probably like him more than they like me.’ When I mention that both McCurry and Sandy Berger, Clinton’s former national-security adviser, told me that Clinton, too, would have gone to war with Iraq, he doesn’t deny the possibility, though he doesn’t confirm it either, saying, ‘I’m still not exactly sure what the intelligence really said. But I can tell you this: I would have asked the Congress for authority to use force if Saddam did not allow the inspectors back in, or did not cooperate with them, or we found weapons of mass destruction. Because he never did anything he wasn’t forced to do, at least in my experience.’” (emphasis added)

But, astonishingly, he then tries to make the case that if only he’d had more time as president, he could have really hit Bin Laden and prevented 9/11″ “I desperately wish, that I had been president when the FBI and CIA finally confirmed, officially, that bin Laden was responsible for the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. Then we could have launched an attack on Afghanistan early. I don’t know if it would have prevented 9/11, but it certainly would have complicated it.”

Oh, Bill, Bill, Bill. Everybody knew it was Bin Laden. You knew it was Bin Laden at the time. Richard Clarke in his book says you specifically ruled out military action after the Cole in October 2000 because you wanted to try once again to get an Israel-Palestinian peace deal. Get real. Oh, wait, I’m talking about Bill Clinton here.