The following goodies arrived from Amazon.com today:

Six Days of War by Michael Oren. (Be sure to catch his interview with Terry Gross)

The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic
and
Wightwick and Gaafar's Arabic Verbs and Essentials of Grammar

I'm brushing up on the Arabic that I first learned as a high school student in Israel back in the 1970s. Because this is an important language to know, folks, and there aren't enough Americans who know any. One of the reasons for last year's intelligence failure was that there weren't enough Near-East language experts to sift through all the data that had been acquired. If you're still in college, why not take Arabic next fall?