For weeks Nick Turse's new book has been rattling around in my head. Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam is not just another history book. Its implications for today are both profound and unnerving. It will haunt you every time the United States launches yet another military adventure somewhere in the world in the name of American idealism.

How to convey 260 meticulously documented, explosive pages of horror stories? On every page there's a new one, barely believable, that demands to be shared. Maybe you begin with My Lai, the scandal we still all know about, the one that has borne the burden as America's shameful bad apple in Vietnam. Until now.

For my sins, I found myself spending last Saturday at the final speeches in the Liberal leadership race. The snorefest lasted exactly four hours but felt like four days. Has so little excitement ever been generated by so many candidates among so many partisans in the annals of our species?

Heaven knows where the Liberal Party would be today were it not for Justin Trudeau, whose coronation this weekend is merely a formality.

We now have the answers to three of the central questions at the heart of Canadian political life today.

President Barack Obama's trip to the Middle East last week -- two days in Israel and four hours in the West Bank -- did exactly nothing to advance the prospects for a just settlement in that volatile region. He'd have done better going to the movies in Washington.

Way back in June 2009, when he presumably believed that his views mattered, Mr. Obama delivered an unqualified message to the Israeli government, then as now headed by Benjamin Netanyahu. Speaking in Cairo, he boldly declared that "The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop."

It is a phenomenon rarely noted that virtually every left-wing government since the Second World War, almost all of them elected, has faced vicious, sometimes violent, obstruction by its enemies both internal and foreign. Many were overthrown. As Henry Kissinger explained just before the American-backed coup against Salvador Allende in Chile, "The issues are too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."

Not surprisingly, the histories of all such governments have, for better or worse, been deeply influenced by such hostile interventions.