Before it's too late, I have decided to read through Kenneth M. Pollack's The Threatening Storm, though the version I have does not have the subtitle that so irritates Pollack: "The case for invading Iraq." Pretty interesting, particularly on inter-agency debates on Iraq during the Clinton years, though there are times (just to quibble) Pollack relies on his written sources a trifle too closely. For example, he writes that one of the Iraqi intelligence services might have been involved in the assassination of Israeli ambassador to the UK, Shlomo Argov, in 1982. The only problem is that Argov died only a few weeks ago. And Pollack's assertion that the "assassination" "did cause" the invasion of Lebanon is simply untrue, as any reader of Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari's Israel's Lebanon War will swiftly attest.

Not a cental argument of Pollack's, but the 1982 Lebanon war was one thing the Iraqis did not provoke.