A former counterterrorism adviser to President Bush, Richard Clarke, was on CBS News’s “60 Minutes” last night and is out with a new book criticizing Mr. Bush’s leadership in the war on terrorism. Mr. Clarke has a formidable reputation among national security types, and we don’t doubt his sincerity or his motives. Still, to judge by Mr. Clarke’s televised remarks yesterday, it is going to be hard to take him seriously. He lost us about when, on television last night, he likened Mr. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq to a hypothetical President Franklin Roosevelt deciding, after the Pearl Harbor attack,”Let’s invade Mexico.”

Mr. Clarke may be fuzzy on the details, but here’s a reminder: After Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt didn’t just go to war against Japan. He went to war against Germany and Italy, too. Mr. Bush, for his part, first went to war in

Afghanistan, and only then did he take on Iraq. It’s not as if Mr. Bush attacked Canada. Iraq’s government-controlled press cheered the September 11 attack on America. The Iraqi government was writing $25,000 checks to the families of suicide bombers who attacked Israel, without discrimination as to whether the victims in those suicide attacks were Israelis or visiting Americans. Abu Abbas, the mastermind of the Achille Lauro hijacking in which American Leon Klinghoffer was pushed overboard in his wheelchair, was being harbored in Baghdad.

Iraq was on the U.S. State Department’s list of state sponsors of terror all through the Clinton administration, in which Mr. Clarke also served in a senior counterterrorism post. One of the glaring questions in the Clarke episode is where was the Clinton administration. When Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act by an overwhelming vote in both houses, the Clinton administration ducked its responsibilities under the law to start backing and funding the democratic Iraqi groups in exile.

As for whether Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was directly involved in the September 11, 2001, attack on America, Mr. Clarke seems somehow insulted that when he wrote a September 18, 2001, memo asserting there was no Iraqi involvement, senior aides to Mr. Bush kicked the memo back to Mr. Clarke for more work. For any government official definitively to rule out Iraqi involvement in a mere week’s time strikes us as jumping to conclusions, a suggestion that the official’s mind isn’t fully open to the possibilities. All the signal intelligence possibly linking foreign countries to the September 11 plot hadn’t even been translated by September 18. Even today, the interrogations of Iraqi officials and Al Qaeda prisoners are not complete.

The “60 Minutes” reporter suggested that Mr. Clarke was angry that he hadn’t been able to prevent the attacks on America. Mr. Clarke conceded that. Mr. Bush responded to that feeling of anger by channeling it positively, liberating Iraq and Afghanistan. All Mr. Clarke seems to have done, by contrast, is to wallow and fling bitter recriminations. It’s a sad end to the career of a distinguished public servant.