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Summary: Excellent history of Gulf War I reads like a novel......
Review: 13 years and two Administrations ago, the entire world watched as the first President Bush marshaled a global coalition to confront Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and gave him an ultimatum: leave Kuwait by Jan. 15, 1991, or we'll force you out. Three months had passed since Iraq had invaded its tiny but rich neighbor, claiming the Kuwaitis were slant-drilling into Iraqi oil fields just across the border. In reality, as Rick Atkinson points out in Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War, Saddam was strong-arming his way out of repaying loans made to Iraq by Kuwait and other moderate Arab countries during his disastrous war with Iran. He may have also been angered by OPEC's lowering of the price of crude oil, which reduced badly-needed hard currency for his moribund economy. In a classic case of what novelist Tom Clancy calls "armed robbery writ large," Saddam followed Hitler's example of trumping up claims on a neighboring country, massing a huge army on its borders, then invading. While Atkinson (The Thin Gray Line, An Army At Dawn) focuses on the events of the war itself, he carefully explains the almost Byzantine turns of American foreign policy toward Iraq. In the mid-1980s, Washington, worried that Iran would defeat Iraq, provided Baghdad with limited intelligence assistance and looked the other way when other countries (such as France, Brazil, and the USSR) sold Saddam sophisticated weapons. Only after the 1987 USS Stark incident, when an Iraqi Mirage "accidentally" fired an Exocet missile at a U.S. frigate in the Gulf and killed and injured several sailors, did U.S. policymakers start looking at Saddam as a potential adversary. But until 1990, official policy in Washington was to try to coax Baghdad into joining the fold of civilized nations in the so-called post-Cold War "new order." In fact, as Atkinson points out, Washington's desire to establish better trade and diplomatic relations may have given Saddam the "green light" to invade Kuwait. The White House, for instance, censured the Voice of America for airing reports about Iraq's repressive government, and Ambassador April Glaspie's comment in July 1990 that the U.S. had no intentions to intervene in "Arab-Arab" disputes further reinforced the Iraqi dictator's view that America was a post-Vietnam "paper tiger" and would not lift a finger to help the Sheik of Kuwait. Crusade is intensely fascinating and detailed. It is incredibly well-written, enabling the reader to get both the Big Picture and see the war through the combatants' point of view. It's no exaggeration to say that it reads like a Clancy novel; we get not only personality sketches of H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the "CINC" of Central Command and overall commander of Desert Storm and his chief lieutenants (Charles Horner, "Buster" Glosson, Cal Waller, Fred Franks), but we also get vivid descriptions of the intense aerial and ground battles that became known as Operation Desert Storm. Atkinson also deals with the unexpected aftermath of the Persian Gulf War -- the short period of national high-fiving after the liberation of Kuwait that gave way to disillusion. In a matter of months, President George Herbert Walker Bush went from being a popular wartime leader to being booted out of the Oval Office in the 1992 election. Saddam Hussein, meanwhile, crushed not one but two post-war revolts (encouraged but not supported by President Bush) and withstood nearly 12 years of sanctions and sporadic air and missile attacks as he defiantly thumbed his nose at three American Presidents. (Now that he's in U.S. custody, maybe he isn't feeling so cocky, but that's another story.)
Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: A Tom Clancy(ish) history - hard to put down and quite detailed enough. The book spends little time looking at the pre war diplomacy - straight into Desert Stor
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Summary: Couldn't put it down (and it's heavy!)
Review: A very long, detailed account of the Gulf War is about the last book I expected to love--except that it was by Rick Atkinson. As in "The Long Gray Line", he has written a wonderful, readable book with amazing command of technology, the military, and politics. I learned a lot.
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Summary: Good US oriented view of the war
Review: A well rounded account, especially of the level of fracticide experienced by US forces, and exposes the continuing high level of SAM threat faced by pilots in a combat zone, and the high level of coastal mining - something mostly ignored by broadcast media as unsexy. As a Brit I would have liked more coverage of the European forces but c'est la vie. Good even handed epilogue with especially refreshing critique of N. Swartzkopf and the strategy he headed. I look forward to a follow on book on Kosovo - any chance Mr Author ?
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Summary: Still the definitive account of Desert Storm & Desert Shield
Review: Atkinson's account of the Gulf War has managed to outdo every participant who has written about it. He does this by exposing every significant detail of the conflict. The aspects that most fascinated me include the negotiations with Saudi Arabia and Israel, the coverage of the military campaign (in the air, land, and sea), and the allied military personalities. Atkinson covers all of these angles - and more - as well as any other journalist/author. His style and professionalism is on a level with Bob Woodward (both are both Pulitzer Prize winners). On all counts Atkinson is fair and thorough. Probably the best example of this is his portrayal of Schwarzkopf. More critical of his methods than the man himself, Atkinson summarizes, "Even for men who had seen horrific bloodletting in Vietnam, no Asian jungle was more stressful than the endless weeks they spent in Norman Schwarzkopf's Riyadh basement." Still, this is not a book about Schwarzkopf. Everyone and everything gets their due coverage - cruise missiles of all kinds, scuds, Colin Powell and Dick Cheney, British special forces, the Israeli Defense Minister, Iraq's Republican Guard, and others. Again, the scope is impressive. Except for any secrets that may be declassified in the future, "Crusade" is still the most comprehensive account of Desert Storm and Desert Shield. If you think you know everything there is to know about the Gulf War, you are guaranteed to learn something new from "Crusade."
Rating:
Summary: Still the definitive account of Desert Storm & Desert Shield
Review: Atkinson's account of the Gulf War has managed to outdo every participant who has written about it. He does this by exposing every significant detail of the conflict. The aspects that most fascinated me include the negotiations with Saudi Arabia and Israel, the coverage of the military campaign (in the air, land, and sea), and the allied military personalities. Atkinson covers all of these angles - and more - as well as any other journalist/author. His style and professionalism is on a level with Bob Woodward (both are both Pulitzer Prize winners). On all counts Atkinson is fair and thorough. Probably the best example of this is his portrayal of Schwarzkopf. More critical of his methods than the man himself, Atkinson summarizes, "Even for men who had seen horrific bloodletting in Vietnam, no Asian jungle was more stressful than the endless weeks they spent in Norman Schwarzkopf's Riyadh basement." Still, this is not a book about Schwarzkopf. Everyone and everything gets their due coverage - cruise missiles of all kinds, scuds, Colin Powell and Dick Cheney, British special forces, the Israeli Defense Minister, Iraq's Republican Guard, and others. Again, the scope is impressive. Except for any secrets that may be declassified in the future, "Crusade" is still the most comprehensive account of Desert Storm and Desert Shield. If you think you know everything there is to know about the Gulf War, you are guaranteed to learn something new from "Crusade."
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding!
Review: Certainly the best single book on the Persian Gulf War. Atkinson has managed to tell a story that is both complete and detailed. He tells the story of the war from the perspective of the individual soldiers and airmen, the commanders, and the politicians. There's historical perspective, technical detail, explaination of stratgey and a ripping good narrative that pulls the reader along. It's not perfect. Atkinson makes a few flubs along the way on matters of technical detail, but they're few and far between. He occasionally inserts an interior monolog that pushes the limit of reporting, but it's not done to excess. Overall an excellent example of how to write popular military history.
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Summary: My favorite Gulf War Book
Review: Crusade is a readable, riveting narrative of the events of the Persian Gulf War. It it one of the few texts on the subject which doesn't appear to have any other agenda than the truth. Political analysis, technical detail and first person accounts are woven together to enlighten and educate the reader. As a counterpoint, the book does suffer from its closeness to the event as time has revealed new facts and insights about the war
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Summary: Read it and you will know what happened at the Gulf
Review: For an Austrian like me it is probably not that easy to get as much information about the Gulf War, as someone gets in the United States. Nevertheless - if you read that book you will know, what happened at the Gulf. And you will get a feeling what key persons of the Army, Air Force and Navy thougt and not only how they acted in those nerve racking weeks. I was not there, but now I can imagine a little bit how it must have been.
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Summary: The single best account of the Gulf War to date
Review: For anybody even remotely interested in what happened on the ground during the course of Desert Storm, this book is a must read! Atkinson keeps his text informative, yet entertaining. His exhaustive research and easy-to-digest prose makes this book a sure-fire way for the layman with no previous military or historical background to fully comprehend and appreciate the actions of our armed forces in this conflict.
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