My prematurely graying hair would have caught fire during Richard A. Clarke's interview on "60 Minutes," but more out of vanity than protest, I shaved it off during the disputed presidential election four years ago.

In a newly published memoir that's bound to put him in the annals of Republican demonology alongside former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, Clarke alleges that President Bush's subordinates initially rejected intelligence findings that contradicted the administration's dogma that Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

"Against all Enemies" paints a picture of a Bush White House so invested in toppling Saddam, it elevated a quixotic hunt for evidence of ties between Iraq and al-Qaida to a level of absurdity reminiscent of Lewis Carroll.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld established the tone of the administration's response to Sept. 11 by declaring in true Mad Hatter-style that bombing Iraq was a sensible response because there were "no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan."

According to Clarke, Rumsfeld's logic wasn't an isolated case of one official squeezing into the narrow rabbit hole of ideology. In trying to stay on the same page as President Bush, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and other high-ranking administration officials took turns muttering "Off with Saddam's head" until the sheer weight of intelligence forced them to deal with al-Qaida as the primary culprit behind the Sept. 11 attacks.

Still, the Bush administration found a way to drag the nation into a bloody adventure in Iraq shortly after toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan. Now thousands of casualties and more than 500 American lives later, we're still searching for a way out of the Iraqi looking glass.

Clarke's astounding chronicle of cynicism and jabberwocky at the Bush White House during a time of unprecedented terror is the kind of cautionary tale that gives old-fashioned self-deception a bad name.

As the administration's counterterrorism coordinator until 13 months ago, Clarke can't be easily discounted by Bush partisans as a "wild-eyed liberal who hates America." He may be a holdover from Bill Clinton's administration, but Clarke served Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in senior and Cabinet-level positions, too.

Clarke's reputation for hawkishness during the 1991 Gulf War should insulate him from the verities of Republican character assassination. Because it won't be possible to portray him as the kind of fellow who munches celery sprigs at a Thomas Merton Center gala, the administration will have to say he's just another "disgruntled employee."

Between "The Price of Loyalty," Paul Suskind's account of Secretary O'Neill's misadventures in the Bush Cabinet, and Clarke's book, a less-than-flattering picture of a White House has emerged as a possible election issue.

These books by former Bush insiders echo a theme that resonates with the president's critics: Despite talent and experience, the Bush administration is hobbled by reliance on scripts that don't conform to reality and a president who values the perception of decisive action over curiosity and intellectual clarity.

Isn't it ironic that legendary investigative reporter Bob Woodward's exploration of these events in "Bush at War" failed to pick up on the tunnel vision Clarke, O'Neill and Suskind describe in such depressing detail?

Perhaps that's the difference between the "unlimited access" of an embedded reporter who is fed a diet of sanitized reality and the perspectives of those who witnessed the administration's myopia behind closed doors. Maybe Woodward was a little too embedded.

Is Woodward's laudatory treatment of Bush's response to Sept. 11 the more reliable version or have O'Neill and Clarke provided a more honest account of one of the darkest chapters in our history? Is the full story yet to be told? Colin Powell, please pick up the phone. Your agent is on line two!