What is the importance of Iraq in the nonfiction book, Al Franken, Giant of the Senate?

While Franken is an adamant supporter of the troops, especially those deployed overseas, his connection with Iraq goes deeper than his multiple USO tours there; Iraq is used as an example of the incompetency of the Bush administration and its willingness to lie. It is also the first military crisis Franken was able to weigh in on in his capacity as a political commentator and later a Senator. Franken's inspiration for entering politics, Paul Wellstone, was the only senator up for reelection in 2002 to publicly and critically condemn Bush's decision to invade Iraq. Franken undoubtedly sided with Wellstone, recalling "it's still crazy to think that [Cheney], and the president, and so many others (including, for God's sake, Colin Powell) just flat-out lied us into a war" (57). As a satirist who began his political career writing scathing analyses of right-wing liars, he reserves a special disdain for a war started entirely from lies. To make matters worse, "Bush et al. hadn't just lied us into a war. They'd lied us into a disaster" (58).