The Washington monthly's 2005 annual political book award winner.

The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq by George Packer Farrr, Straus and Giroux, $26

Wars make for dramatic journalism, but there is a reason this is the first truly great book of the Iraq war. Packer has chosen the right theme: how the abstractions in the heads of the war's proponents--brooding neocons, detail-allergic Bush officials, liberal intellectuals eager to advance the cause of humanitarian intervention--fell apart in the difficult realities of an actual invasion. Having roamed all of the war's fronts--from the battlefields of Baghdad to the conference halls of Washington think tanks--Packer encountered the full range of the war's players. And he carves his characters sharply--an Iraqi coroner, a brainy, high-minded American lieutenant, the pro-war liberal thinker Paul Berman. He uses these figures to craft a gripping narrative that manages to present, painfully but unflinchingly, the war's essential question: Was it worth it? Packer, who started out an aggressive pro-war liberal himself, ends with a deeply ambivalent answer. That in itself speaks volumes about the great difficulty, in 2005, of mounting a real intellectual defense of the Iraq war.