That Kerry’s bout of foot-in-mouth disease highlights is how Senators treat Iraq more as political football than a national security issue. If not Kerry, then we have Biden masquerading as a twenty-first century Gertrude Bell, and Kennedy filling al-Jazeera with sound bites. There’s an incestuous narrative out there both feeding such politicians and amplifying them. Many of the Iraq books—those by Diamond, Phillips, Packer, Galbraith, and Chandrasekaran, for example—put politics above accuracy and will not stand the test of time. How refreshing it is, then, to come across a serious, dispassionate book that really adds a serious infusion of new information. On Point: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom is one such book. I reviewed it here. For those interested in how the US Army prepared for war and what lessons it will take from the Iraq campaign, it’s a must-read.