Been reading Tom Clancy's OP Center series. I don't think he personally writes them, which is probably why I enjoy them (wasn't a big fan of Red October)
Between reading these (I'm up through the ones written before 1998) and reading Nelson DeMille's 'Lyon's Game', I can't get over how accurate these guys were in portraying middle eastern terrorism before 9-11 put it on the map. It's amazing how they talk about the lack of human intelligence officers, financial cutbacks, and how these terrorist think and act.
Both of them acknowledge that the next American war would be against terrorists on a national scale, and our laziness would come back and bite us in the ass. It's scary reading and seeign how right they would become. They also said it would be one massive event that would get us into the war.
I don't get how these guys saw the signs, yet our goverment did not.