This week at Cafe, filmmaker and author Eugene Jarecki joins us for TPM Cafe book club. We'll be discussing his recent book, The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men and a Republic in Peril. Expanding on the themes from his film, Why We Fight, we'll be talking war, American foreign policy, the public's mandate and the Constitution. Or, in Eugene's words:

I try to put today's constitutional crisis (let's call it what it is) in an historical perspective. The Framers intended a government of the people, in which the separated powers of equal and opposing branches of government would exert checks and balances over each other and thus prevent any individual or faction from steamrolling the remainder of the society. Fast-forward two hundred years and we today see a very different picture - a government unleashed, its arrogant executive branch, aided by Congress and the courts as it tramples over the separation of powers, shows contempt for the checks and balances, and guides the country to long-term ruin in its effort to seize its own short-term gains.

Joining Eugene are Lawrence Wilkerson, retired United States Army Colonel and former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Greg Mitchell, Editor of Editor & Publisher magazine, and author, most recently of So Wrong for So Long on Iraq and the media, Andrew Bacevich, Professor of international relations at Boston University and author of The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a foundation focused on nuclear weapons policy and conflict resolution, Ben Friedman, Ph.D. candidate in Political science at MIT, and Research Fellow in Defense and Homeland Security Studies at the Cato Institute, and Naomi Wolf, author of Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.

Join us.