Books in Brief
Dawn Over Baghdad: How the U.S. Military is Using Bullets and Ballots to Remake Iraq by Karl Zinsmeister (Encounter, 237 pp., $25.95). During the drive on Baghdad, many reporters were embedded with military units. This program gave us the best reporting of the war, and produced a number of solid books, among them Karl Zinsmeister’s first book on Iraq, Boots on the Ground.
But then the press retreated to Baghdad’s hotels, and the reporting turned negative and distanced. Feeling newspaper readers weren’t getting the real story, Zinsmeister re-embedded with soldiers in the Sunni Triangle early in 2004. Dawn Over Baghdad is his account of our fight to establish “a free, prosperous, and democratic Iraq.”
Despite press accounts that trumpet each outbreak as the start of a civil war, the United States is carrying both the military and political battles. Most Iraqis are opposed to insurgent attacks and are against both an Islamic state and a Baathist revival. “The Iraqi public,” Zinsmeister says, “is more sensible, stable, and moderate than is commonly portrayed.” Still, he sees Iraq as a broken land of corruptions that are the legacy of decades of state socialism: “We could pour billions into this place and make no long-run difference if we don’t change attitudes.”
Zinsmeister regards the media as almost as great a threat to our soldiers as the insurgents. Our troops confront a “two-front war” against terrorists and against adversaries on the world’s news desks. Zinsmeister presents a depressing litany of exaggerations, selective readings, and lies, all designed to present the Iraq war as a failure. The war is too important to let it be “done in by snipers plinking from keyboards.”
Ultimately, Dawn Over Baghdad is about those who serve. Quoting a professor who told protesters that they could be proud that they were “A students, who think for themselves,” in contrast to the “C students with their stupid fingers on the trigger,” Zinsmeister finds the troops are a widely diverse group, some possessing advanced degrees, and many boasting real accomplishments in military and civilian life. While no angels, they are professional, committed, and often caring. Most are capable of making good decisions on the fly in dangerous situations. Contrary to the professor, “independent thinking . . . is not only tolerated in our armed forces, it is required.”
–Dan Dickinson
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts: Journeys in Kurdistan by Christiane Bird (Ballantine, 432 pp., $25.95). The Kurds are one of the most important political factors in the Middle East. Spread across six countries, they number perhaps forty million–larger than the population of Canada and more pro-American. At the same time the Kurds are mistrusted and discounted. Human-rights groups that once publicized Iraq’s genocide of the Kurds now ignore them. When the United States transferred power to the Iraqis in June, the State Department closed down its representation in Iraqi Kurdistan–a slight to a region that opinion polls show is over 90 percent pro-American.
Christiane Bird’s well-written travelogue starts to fill an important gap in popular knowledge of the Kurds. Bird describes the suffering of the Kurds, as well as their diversity and frequent disunity. The Kurds have an interest in changing the status quo in the Middle East and a desire to see democracy forced upon the region. And some changes have happened. Since the fall of Saddam, the Kurds of Iran and Syria have openly challenged their regimes. In Turkey, the government has been forced to ease restrictions on the Kurds so that it can start negotiations for membership in the European Union.
Iraqi Kurdistan is now the most peaceful region of Iraq, a place where there has not been a single terrorist attack on American forces. The Kurds often say that they have no friends but the mountains. Read this book and you will understand why in Iraq the Americans need to give the Kurds another friend.
–Andrew Apostolou
