Editor’s Note: This review is written by Conor Fallen Bailey, who currently interns with Participant Television and is starting his third year at UCLA, majoring in English with minors in Film and Women’s Studies. He hopes to eventually work in Hollywood to help shift the mass media machine toward social activism through storytelling, a goal he finds well-represented by Participant and TakePart.

Joe Wilson’s The Politics of Truth is part memoir and part scathing indictment of the Bush administration. Reading it five years after the fact, I was shocked by just how much the U.S. knew then (before the re-election of George W. Bush) about the Valerie Plame leak and, more broadly, why the U.S. went to war in Iraq.

The Politics of Truth is vast in scope in all that it covers of one man’s involvement in critiquing his government. Much of the first half of the book is Wilson’s own story of rising through the Foreign Service ranks–ultimately the reason why after you read this book you’ll understand Wilson’s need to correct the record when then-President Bush said there was intelligence linking Saddam Hussein to the purchasing of uranium in “an African country ” in the 2003 State of the Union address. Wilson himself had been asked to take a trip to Niger (a country he once served in) to investigate that claim in 2002, and he had decisively found nothing, as had two other reports.

This unfounded statement in the State of the Union, this lie, helped propel the U.S. into a war with Iraq that Wilson claims had been at least on the horizon for all of W.’s administration. The Bush administration later admitted that “the sixteen word” statement by Bush had been based on faulty intelligence–but not before Joe Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame Wilson, then an undercover CIA agent working on nuclear non-proliferation, was outed by reporter Robert Novak. Public exposure of a CIA operative’s identity not only effectively ends a career, but also happens to be a federal crime for whomever had access to an operative’s identity and divulged it.

Such is the complicated web of deception and abuse of power that lead the American government, or at least two people in that government, to deliberately expose and negate a national security asset to retaliate against a critic. Joe Wilson already suspected I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby (who was eventually convicted but only for lying to investigators) in 2004. George W. Bush commuted Libby’s prison sentence, and no one was ever convicted specifically for the Plame identity leak. This scandal went all the way to the highest offices; in fact, TIME recently published a story analyzing Bush and Cheney’s views over the prosecution and possible pardon of Libby, and his role in the scandal known as Plamegate.

While almost everything in Wilson’s memoirs eventually informs or ties into a discussion of his wife’s exposure by her own government, his over twenty years in the Foreign Service are fascinating in their own right, particularly because Wilson’s story offers a good sense of the Africa’s history over the last few decades. Also, Wilson’s one tour outside of Africa happened to be Baghdad in the run-up to the First Gulf War, and Wilson holds the distinction of being the last American diplomat to talk officially with Saddam Hussein.

The writing in The Politics of Truth is engaging and personal, and while Wilson’s diplomatic career does not tell the story of one country consistently, his narrative takes his readers all over Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Upon returning to Washington, he served under Bill Clinton as the administration tackled the Yugoslav wars of the late ’90s. Wilson does, of course, tactfully cover his relationship and marriage to Valerie Plame, but ultimately she herself is not a main character in the book. (Plame later wrote her own book, Fair Game.)

If nothing else, Wilson’s message in this book is for citizens to vote, and to remain active participants in this democracy that he served for so long, lest we allow those in power to manipulate facts unopposed for their own political ends.