Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Crusade : The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War by Rick Atkinson ISBN: 0-395-71083-9 Publisher: Mariner Books Pub. Date: 19 October, 1994 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.68 (25 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Good strategical perspective of the campaign
Comment: The author achieves to present a good story. He gives you a good insight on the strategical perspective of Gulf War in an uncommon way for the kind: straigthforward story telling. Essentials like logistics, deployment, build-up and theatre operations are well described. Naval, Air and Special Forces operations have their share in the book giving a complete picture of the Allied strategy in the Gulf War campaign. Personal experiences are included but are not the norm. The author has a good timing on jumping into the description of some specifical tactical action or a personal narrative. Atkinson shows himself as a good straightforward story teller. His narrative is easy to follow and he is capable of keeping the reader interested troughout the entire book.
This book concentrates on campaign facts. It is not an analysis of Middle East politics.
What remains untold is the Iraki's story. Like all wars we'll have to wait sometime before the looser's-point-of-view literature can be studied.
Rating: 5
Summary: Couldn't put it down (and it's heavy!)
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: Excellent history of Gulf War I reads like a novel......
Comment: 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.)
 |
Title: An Army at Dawn : The War in Africa, 1942-1943, Volume One of the Liberation Trilogy by Rick Atkinson ISBN: 0805074481 Publisher: Owl Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
 |
Title: The Long Gray Line : The American Journey of West Point's Class of 1966 by Rick Atkinson ISBN: 0805062912 Publisher: Owl Books Pub. Date: 15 October, 1999 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
 |
Title: In the Company of Soldiers : A Chronicle of Combat by Rick Atkinson ISBN: 0805075615 Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Inc. Pub. Date: 15 March, 2004 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
 |
Title: The Eyes of Orion: Five Tank Lieutenants in the Persian Gulf War by Alex Vernon, Greg Downey, Rob Holmes, David Trybula, Neal, Jr. Creighton ISBN: 0873387155 Publisher: Kent State Univ Pr Pub. Date: August, 2001 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
 |
Title: The Generals' War : The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf by Michael R. Gordon, General Bernard E. Trainor ISBN: 0316321001 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 09 November, 1995 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
