Customer Reviews

Dawn Over Baghdad: How the U.S. Military Is Using Bullets and Ballots to Remake Iraq

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Great book. Fascinating reading, and very helpful to me personally.

I?m not a political animal, and have to admit I was sorta neutral about the Iraq war. Until these latest beheadings. They?ve reminded me that these people are not going to go away, and are not going to leave us alone if we just mind our own business. Paul Johnson was a good neighbor and worker just minding his own Ps and Qs in Saudi Arabia, and that didn?t matter a bit to the fanatics who killed him like a dog just for being an American.

So I decided I better get up to speed on what?s going on in Iraq. One Google search later I ended up at Amazon scanning the reviews on this book. Overnight delivery. Then I start to read--and find out this book covers events that took place just a few weeks ago. How the publishers got it published so fast I have no idea.

Moral: What a country! I decide I want some accurate, non-government information on a big issue of concern. One day later I?m reading. Two days later I?ve got a whole head full of powerful new information, direct from an honest eyewitness source, at the tip of my tongue.

Not exactly like Saudi Arabia.

It won't convince anyone who has already made up their mind that the war against Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime was a mistake but Karl Zinmeister pens a convincing argument that things are getting better in Iraq and most people there are happier these days. Of course it's not all chocolate and sunshine. Although he's confident that Iraq can pull itself together and make a convincing go at democracy, Zinmeister several times hints he's concerned about elements in the Sunni minority that seem hell-bent on fighting the transformation of Iraq.

That said, Dawn over Baghdad is a persuasive work that makes you question what you've been seeing on the network news every night. We're all aware of the old newsroom mantra "If it bleeds, it leads" but the fact that the media is unwilling or unable to show the other side of post-war Iraq is an indictment on that institution. Dawn over Baghdad is a good effort at balancing out the public record.

The night I got this book I read it straight through. I suffered the next day at work, but I couldn?t stop. And I don?t regret it. It was a thrilling night, and?more importantly?this book has changed the way I look at my country.

I?m an attorney, so I work a lot with evidence. I interact regularly with police officers, plenty of anti-social criminals, judges. And I?ve come to suspect over the last year, as a gut feeling, that much of the reporting we get from Iraq is just plain bent. Too many inconsistencies, too many gaps, too little context, too selective, too much hysteria, ALWAYS NEGATIVE. If you?ve had a similar sinking feeling, you will definitely find it interesting to read this book.

Very different from the skin-deep treatments of the Iraq fight that I?ve been able to find before now. The author is rational, clear, brutally direct, and writes about some fascinating stuff. I don?t know how he got to sit in on some of these things. Or, more accurately, I don?t know why lots of other reporters haven?t bothered themselves to sit in on events to observe as broadly and carefully as he has.

I?ve been starving for direct, first-hand, unfiltered information that gets beneath the body counts and the superficial ?Paul Bremer did this? politics. And I don?t think the fault heretofore has been mine?I?ve been scouring magazine racks and bookstores for a year. This book is full of what I?ve been hungry for?good storytelling about real lives and actual results.

There are scads of historical studies and learned theses on the Middle East out there now. There are whole forests of bulletins on what happened today in Baghdad. But until I read this book I could find no one who combined eyewitness information from right in the midst of the Iraq whirlwind with some deeper perspective and wisdom than the average journalist brings to his ten-paragraph daily story.

I don?t know anything about Zinmeister?s background (I?m about to read his previous book on Iraq next), but I can tell you he writes with a novelist?s eye and an historian?s judgment. He?s very blunt and unsentimental, and occasionally fiery, so don?t read this to put yourself asleep. But if you want to rev up your thinking on America?s Public Topic #1, here?s some tasty caffeine.

If you're suspicious of all the gloom and doom reporting on the Iraq war from the NYTimes and the other liberal media, and if you want to hear the other side of the story--a story involving solid gains in winning the war and constructing a civil society--then you need to read this book. The author was with the 82nd Airborne during the war, and he reembedded with them earlier this year to get a sense of how the reconstruction was going. This is no utopian vision--it has been a tough go--but Zinsmeister uses on the spot reporting and extensive interviews with U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians to show how a better world there is being assembled brick by brick and bullet by bullet where the "insurgents" are concerned. The liberal media emphasize the downside and the heartbreak because they have an agenda: dump Bush. Without this or any other agenda, Zinsmeister is free to give us what Paul Harvey used to call the rest of the story. As the handover to the Iraqi interim government takes place, this book is the perfect way to understand what is really happening over there and what the prospects for success are.

In contemporary America, the media reports the bloody details to keep an American public glued to the TV with apprehension over Iraq and the WoT in general. The military can't do much to show the public it's side of the story either, it can't force reporters to go out and show the good news as well as the bad, and of course, for the most part the press refuse to do so.

Enter Karl Zinsmeister with his newly released book, Dawn over Baghdad. Those of us who have friends in Iraq may get a glimpse of the true picture in Iraq, the hardships our troops endure, and the difficult accomplishments they fulfill on a daily basis that pass unnoticed by the selective eye of the western media. However, for those that do not know where to blog or don't know anyone deployed in the military that can relay more balanced news regarding Iraq, this book is an important breath of fresh air.

It isn't particuarly long, nor is it particuarly deep. It is however, just enough detailed information about the positive side of the US military operations in Iraq to whet your appetite for more. US Brigade commanders dealing with Iraqi mullahs, patiently, and firmly, preventing outbreaks of jihadist violence when possible, yet skillfully handling such outbreaks when they are inevitable. Dealing with everyday people, trying to cajole the managers of state owned plants to start engaging in capitalism and to put their employees back to work. Dealing with chronic electrical outages, ironically due to the increasing demand for electricity due to new appliances even while capacity is higher than before Operation Iraqi Freedom took place. Senior US officers making sure that Iraqi women always have a representative voice in the forming government, even when the mullahs claim Iraqi women do not want one. So many tiny, fascinating sociological battles that our media is missing, simply to play up blood and carnage for the benefit of murderers and cutthroats who care about no one.

The writing is inspired and purposeful, but due to the time limits at any one point in the author's travels, his book doesn't dwell long an any given situation, and it certainly does not resolve anything he presents. The situation in Iraq is still developing, and it will for quite a few years. However, this book is an excellent insight into what we as a country are truly trying to do, and how well our troops are doing it. It is a life preserver of optimism in a sea of despair, which makes it much more valuable and critical right before the changeover to Iraq's sovereignty on June 30th, 2004. One can only hope the mainstream press takes notice and tries to set the record straight.

Excellent overview of our current (2004) situation in Iraq - both the successes and problems. A good antidote to the non-stop doom and gloom from the US media. The Iraq situation is far from perfect but not at all hopeless. It has the ring of truth.

I'm editor of FrontPage magazine, and Karl Zinsmeister recently took time to discuss with me in Q&A format his new book Dawn Over Baghdad: How the U.S. Military is Using Bullets and Ballots to Remake Iraq.

FP: Congratulations on your new book. You spent three months in combat zones with American soldiers in Iraq doing your research. Tell us about your experience.

Zinsmeister: I began as an embedded reporter during the hot war which toppled Saddam, from which I wrote Boots on the Ground: A Month With the 82nd Airborne in the Battle for Iraq, which was out in August 2003. Then as the guerilla war unfolded, I became concerned that the run-of-the-mill reporting from Iraq wasn't giving a balanced picture. So I decided in early 2004 to re-embed myself with troops in the most troubled parts of the country, in order to get a good first-hand look at the counterinsurgency fight and reconstruction efforts.

I spent several weeks going out on combat patrols, watching interrogations, listening to intelligence briefings, going into Iraqi homes during cordon and search operations, sitting in on city council meetings, observing powwows between American commanders and radical Iraqi imams or tribal sheiks, and so forth. I walked the streets in Baghdad, Fallujah, Abu Ghraib and points in between.

A lot of journalism is serendipity, and I was very lucky in getting to see some important and fascinating things take place. So I quickly turned out Dawn Over Baghdad, which is the only book available today detailing the prosecution of the guerilla war in Iraq, and its actual, ground-level effects on Iraqi society. It's not a policy analysis, it is human storytelling and eyewitness reporting written from the perspective of the ordinary American soldiers and everyday Iraqi citizens who are in the thick of things in critical neighborhoods.

FP: Your book focuses on the terrorist insurrection in the Sunni triangle. Could you tell our readers what this threat entails?

Zinsmeister: Iraq is a big country, and its citizens hold a wide range of viewpoints.There is a large silent majority in Iraq, as in most countries, that is more sensible than you might imagine. Large swaths of the countryside are comparatively quiet. The Iraqi economy will grow about 60 percent this year, and there is a consumer surge going on. Cell phones are proliferating, about a million cars have been imported, a third of the homes now have satellite TV.

These relatively stable areas receive little notice in the West, and that distorts our view of Iraq. But on my latest trip I wanted to go right into the Sunni triangle and observe the worst snakepits in the country. So I spent most of my time in Fallujah and some rough areas of Baghdad.

The fighters in this region are a mix of former Saddam-ites and religious extremists, with extensive orchestration from foreign jihadists. The foreigners are not large in number, but they are behind most of the more serious and visible attacks, including nearly all of the car bombings.

The high end of the latest intelligence estimates is that there are a grand total of around 20,000 insurgents carrying out violence in Iraq today. 20,000 guerillas in a population of 25 million works out to one insurgent for every 1,250 Iraqis. To put that in perspective, consider that one out of every 305 Americans is a Hindu. So guerillas in Iraq are four times less common than Hindus are in the U.S.

Now, many of those 20,000 guerillas are nihilists who hold nothing sacred, and they are obviously capable of sowing lots of instability and fear. So I'm not denying we are in the midst of a tough guerilla fight. But it's important that Americans understand this is not a mass insurrection.

FP: That's not something you'd learn from most reporting.

Zinsmeister: The impression you get from the media is that all Iraqis are up in arms against us. That's completely false. The huge, critical fact missing from most of the reporting from Iraq this year is that the Shiite middle-who are going to run this country-have so far stuck with us through many travails.

Certainly there are too many dangerous fanatics carrying out violence in Iraq today. And much of the rest of the population is afraid to cross them: 70 percent of Iraqis believe their family will be in peril if they are perceived to be cooperating with the U.S. But fearing the guerillas and supporting them are two different things, and the clear evidence of polling, interviews, and behavior on the streets of Iraq is that most ordinary Iraqis do not admire, aid, or encourage the terrorists.

FP: You note that the Shiites offer hope for a democratic Iraq. Tell us why.

The Shiites are about 60 percent of the population-where they go, the rest of Iraq will follow. They were brutalized by Saddam, and loath him and his acolytes, so they will have no truck with insurgents who dream of reinstituting a Baath-style state.

And then there are the foreign jihadis who are behind the most violent armed resistance in Iraq today, under the guidance of an al-Qaeda operative named Zarqawi. Zarqawi does not even consider the Shiites or the Kurds (who together represent 80 percent of the population) to be true Muslims. He calls them scorpions, polytheists, and "the enemy." So the Shiite and Kurdish majority are simply not going to follow the insurgents making most of the trouble in Iraq today.

No one is likely to mistake Iraq for Switzerland any time in the near future. But if Americans will show some endurance and toughness, there is a very good chance that a form of governance far better than anything now existing in the Arab Middle East will take root in Iraq. That is something worth taking some significant risks for. It would have a revolutionary influence in making the world more peaceful and America safer.

I live in one of the "battleground states" for the next Presidental election. You can't watch an hour on TV without seeing the conflicting claims of both candidates about a half dozen times. You soon reach a point of tuning them both out. Each is, shall we say, emphasising their own point of view, if not outright ... no I'm not going to use that word, they wouldn't do that.

And the news isn't much better, I'm continually reminded of the old saying, "if it bleeds it leads." The stories are on the latest bomb, the latest shoot out. Only when the books are written do you begin to get a more balanced, more completely thought out view. The authors conclusion is that ordinary Iraquis back our war and occupation and the U.S. is on the verge of winning a tough guerilla struggle. I certainly hope he's right. Well worth reading to help sort out the BS on TV.

As an Iraq War veteran, Karl Zinsmeister's book is right on the money. His touching descriptions of the American Heroes that he encounters during his visit had me weeping more than once within the first ten pages. Zinsmeister is dead-on in his description of who the real enemies in Iraq are, from the elusive guerrillas to the liberal media that goes to great extremes to avoid telling the real stories that Zinsmeister has no trouble finding. While the legions of liberal reporters hang out in the relative safety of the Green Zone in Baghdad and report sound bights from press conferences, Zinsmeister displays his own personal courage in his willingness to put himself at risk to go out into the countryside and get the real stories. This book is for anyone who wants to know what it's really like in Iraq, as opposed to what we are being fed by the six o'clock news and the morning paper in their meager attempts to support their own political agendas.

"Dawn Over Baghdad" by Karl Zinsmeister reveals the author's strong support for U.S. military personnel serving in Iraq, based upon the author's tour of that country for several months in late 2003 and early 2004. While the subtitle of this book is "How the U.S. Military is Using Bullets and Ballots to Remake Iraq", this book is not an exhaustive, detailed account as to how specific U.S. military units have spent $X to build Y# of schools/etc. in any specific city. This book is a very upbeat, effusive report of the author finding highly motivated American soldiers who are interested in helping Iraq become a democracy - although that was a far-away dream back when this book was written in early 2004. This book has big-print size lettering and wide margins, making the book feel and look more substantive than what it really is. It is a collection of `snippet' moments of the author's experiences in Iraq, primarily with U.S. soldiers. I found it rather boring and skim-read through it in about a half-hour. A lot of words, just not much insight about the Iraqi people. Rather than a litany of successful re-building stories, this book is more of a `hopeful' attitude that our liberation of Iraq will be eventually justifiable through the overthrow of a dictator and his replacement with an emerging democracy. The 34 photographs were more interesting than the text. If you miss reading this book, you have not missed much.