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 enlarge | Author: Michael Yon
Publisher: Richard Vigilante Books
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $17.77
You Save: $12.18 (41%)
New (27) Collectible (1) from $17.77
Avg. Customer Rating:  104 reviews
Sales Rank: 2872
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 1.1
ISBN: 0980076323
Dewey Decimal Number: 956
EAN: 9780980076325
ASIN: 0980076323
Publication Date: April 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
Great Insight to Counter the MSM's bias July 21, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is a much-needed memoir of our involvement in Iraq. For the duration of America's involvement in Iraq, the citizenry has been deprived of an accurate view of what our brave troops are accomplishing in Iraq. The media simply had little interest in actually sharing the positive aspects of our involvement in Iraq. Yon counteracts that tendency by providing a number of stories that provide a more positive aspect of our troop's actions. Simply stated, Murtha's version of the war is not born out by Yon's. If you read this book, your view of the war will be changed. Maybe not radically, but it will be changed to some degree. It is well written, but not unfair or biased. These traits make it a sure way to open your eyes.
A must read for understanding effective counter-insurgency July 21, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is a very insightful look into the counter-insurgency battle in Iraq. If you want to understand the context of the fight against Al Qaeda in Iraq, this book is an invaluable source. It neither paints a rosy picture, nor a bleak one. His first hand accounts of combat and of the equally critical information war are compelling and informative. Micheal Yon effectively brings to light the competing factors and illustrates the many dimensions of this unconventional war.
Book a bit thrown together, but still the best on Iraq War July 13, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I have found it very frustrating how hard it is to get an accurate sense of what is going in the Iraq War. Much of the media, of course, has a bias that they wear on their sleave: they see the war as Vietnam Act Two, and they strain every nerve to find disaster and defeat in everything. We get dozens of stories about prisoner abuse and the alleged massacre in Haditha; we get close to nothing about Medal of Honor winners.
The problem, however, goes beyond ideological bias, as bad as that has been. The larger problem is that the media does not understand what they are looking at. What facts indicate success? What facts indicate failure? The media, by and large, does not have a clue. They thus confine themselves to reporting the obvious -- like the latest car bombs -- and to printing the opinion of some windbag pundit as if it were news. In this respect, the Right has often been no better than the Left. While the Left sees doom and gloom in everything, the Right sees American victory in everything.
In this total desert barren of understanding, Micheal Yon has been and continues to be one of the few beacons of actual information to come out of the war. Yon is not a conventional reporter. Yon is an ex-Green Beret, who turned into a writer and who does freelance reporting from Iraq. I have read his reports for several years now on the internet. They have been the best single source of information that I have found on the war.
In this book, Yon pulls together what he has seen and where the war is. As he sees it, the war has gone through three phases. First, we had the fast and easy phase when American firepower knocked down Saddam Hussein. Second, we had the disasterous phase when grotesque incompetence on the part of Rumsfield and Bush threw the victory away. Their primary error was not to create law and order in the post-Hussein Iraq. We dismantled the Iraqi army and police, leaving Iraq with no functioning government, but we replaced it with nothing for far too long. In Yon's view, we were also too brutal and too rigid in this phase of the war, with the exception of the work done by General Petreaus as commander of the 101st Airborne. All of these mistakes lead to Al Queda taking over most of the country. This then lead to the third phase, in which Al Queda's unbelievable brutality toward the Iraqi people lead them to turn back to the U.S. and gave us a second chance for victory, which, in Yon's view. General Petreaus is brillantly exploiting, in his new role as overall commander.
Yon is very knowledgeable about the technical aspects of his subject. He understands modern weapons and he understands modern war, particularly that part of the war which is fought in the press. What he stresses, however, is primarily morality. Al Queda lost, in his view, because they had no morality. They acted like savage beasts, killing, raping and stealing from the Iraqi people, which lost them the critical moral high ground. In Yon's view, America is now winning the war, because -- while the Iraqis often saw us as stupid and out of touch -- we were never seen as evil. On the contrary, as Yon describes it, the Iraqi people have gained incredible respect for America, because of the exemplary behavior of our troops. The Iraqis respect strength and fighting spirit, which our soldiers have shown in spades. They also deeply love their children and their families. When they came to see Al Queda as threatening their children and their families, and the U.S. military as protecting them, that was the turning point in the war.
This book has flaws as a book. It is not very polished. It reads at times more like a bunch of reports stuck together than a book. It often assumes that the reader knows about things which the reader might well not know about.
But none of this matters. This book tells the truth about the Iraq War. Amid all of the partisan distortion and ideological hype, here is a guy who knows what he is talking about, who loves the United States and our military and who is dedicated to bringing us the truth, in all of its complexity and ugliness.
Finally an unbiased account of the recent happenings in Iraq July 9, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
While I wish the Iraq war had never happened and personally think it was the biggest favor we could ever do for Iran, I also want to know what is truly happening and not have it filtered from either a right wing or left wing bias. I found this to be a tremendously interesting book. Yon is rightfully critical of the original war planners as being totally unprepared for an insurgency, but tells vivid first hand accounts of how the war is actually now being won. More importantly, he portrays the amazing heroism of the soldiers and leaves you stunned at their courage. He even has pictures of actual battles backing up his accounts. It seems like the turning point was putting General Petreus in command and getting rid of the bozos before him. If anyone is interested in an account of the last year in Iraq which will really give you info you never hear, then I really recommend the book. Even if you are anti-war, it is must reading.
Iraqis and Google Maps July 7, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
While the changes in Iraqi are often attributed to a "surge" or increase in the numbers of our troops there. Michael Yon makes it clear that the real change came when our military began to adopt the 'live with the people' tactics of our special forces. And with that came a change in the attitudes of Iraqi citizens. Here's how he put it:
"We'd spent billions of dollars to protect ourselves against roadside bombs in Iraq, while mostly failing to cultivate the most effective defense of all: an Iraqi citizen with a cell phone. We spent hundreds of billions of dollars on combat operations that might have been avoided if we'd learned from our successes in Mosul in 2003, rather than compounding the blunders of 2004."
But then we'd gotten, miraculously, our second chance. And we were making the most of it. Cell phones? Iraqis are e-mailing our guys Google Earth maps to show where the terrorists are. With the increasing support of citizens and the growing prowess of the Iraqi Army, American troops have been able not only to leverage their combat effectiveness but spend more time in cop-on-the-beat mode, building closer ties to their communities, which then translates into being more effective in working on local civil affairs issues."
--Michael W. Perry, editor of Chesterton on War and Peace: Battling the Ideas and Movements that Led to Nazism and World War II
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