Alexander is one of the leading voices on the rise of a level of mass incarceration in this country in the last 25 years. It’s hard to overstate just how devastating our prison-industrial complex has become. The huge numbers of African American men in jails for nonviolent crimes begs comparison to the darkest days of slavery. Bill Clinton escalated mass incarceration and the “War on Drugs” as a way to prove his political toughness.

The love affair between black folks and the Clintons has been going on for a long time. It began back in 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for president. He threw on some shades and played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show. It seems silly in retrospect, but many of us fell for that. At a time when a popular slogan was “It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand,” Bill Clinton seemed to get us. When Toni Morrison dubbed him our first black president, we nodded our heads. We had our boy in the White House. Or at least we thought we did.

We tend to remember the Clinton Administration through rose-colored glasses but there were a lot of WTF moments we’ve forgotten–three strikes, the sanctions against Iraqi civilians, the way cruise missile strikes seemed to magically coincide with administration scandals, Bill’s serial philandering and Hillary’s slut-shaming responses. On paper, HRC is the most qualified candidate to ever run for the presidency. But if she’s running on the Clinton brand, she needs to explain how her political choices differ from her husband’s 20 years ago.

U.S. officials said that they were about to attack Saturday night, Nov. 14, when Hussein agreed to the inspections. One Pentagon official is quoted as saying “It was almost as if he knew,” which is a ridiculous statement considering that rumors of an imminent attack were circling the internet and news sites all weekend. Of course Hussein knew, we all did.

This should be cause for rejoicing. Blood won’t have to be shed, diplomacy (notably France and Russia’s) have saved the day again, and the U.N. teams can go back to work.

But U.S. administration officials are upset. They wanted a war. They’re double-guessing their timing, wishing they had bombed him earlier this week. They’re implying that they might bomb Baghdad anyway. They’re whining that now they have to once again work with the U.N. and with Iraqi officials.

Why is the Administration so upset? It’s because they have no real policy in the Gulf. Earlier this week they admitted that they didn’t know what they would do after the attack. Here they were sending warships and personnel into the Gulf and they had no long- or mid-term vision for what these people were going to do after the first hundred cruise missiles went off. U.S. policy is once more stuck in the same muddle its been in since mid-1991.

Clinton wishes Hussein would just disappear. That his military would launch a coup and drive him from power. That a cruise missile would hit and kill him. They wish that Iraqi military know-how would disappear. But none of this is likely to happen. In the real world, high-tech U.S. missiles can’t do very much. The real world requires diplomacy, negotiating with people you don’t trust, de-escalating rhetoric. These are skills that the Clinton Administration needs to develop.

It is time for the U.S. to stop whining when diplomacy works. And it is time for a U.S. to develop a realistic policy for building a lasting peace in the Gulf.

But even more worrisome is that Presidential lawyers have concluded that this sort of political assassination attempt doesn’t fall under the 1975 Executive Order banning political murder. The same President who says sex isn’t sex is now saying that assassination isn’t assassination. He’s once again splitting legal hairs and lying to the American people when caught.

Who Clinton sleeps with is his business.

But who he tries to assassinate is the business of all of us. And it’s our business when he breaks U.S. law to do so. And our business when his Administration goes on a concerted, coordinated campaign to lie about a military mission’s goals. The bombings ratcheted up the anti‑U.S. anger in the world. It violated the sovereignty of two nations. It cost over a hundred million dollars. The United States is a democracy and the people need to be involved in making such far-reaching decisions. We need to be fully informed.

The President must be held accountable to U.S. law. And he must be told that creative legal definitions aren’t acceptable in a democracy.