Crusade

Crusade – by Rick Atkinson

If you took a sight-seeing vacation via automobile, upon your return, I would love to have heard about the great things that you saw on your vacation. I would not love it if you would have, instead, popped the hood of your automobile and showed me every component of your car’s engine.  If you videotaped your vacation, and had videotaped 120 hours of footage, I would like to see a 15-minute recap of the highlights, I would not like to have to sit through and watch all 120 hours of unedited footage.

I use these analogies because while I was reading this book, I sometimes felt like I was watching 120 hours of video of someone showing me every component of a car engine.  I felt like this book was simply too much, and was way overdone in terms of detail.

This book is about the 1991 Gulf War.  A war that lasted six weeks.  Yet this book is 500 pages long.  Think about that for a second – a 500-page book about a six-week war.  I’m not sure anyone could do a good job giving such a drawn out narrative about such a brief moment of time, so safe to say, I would have enjoyed this book a lot better had it been carved in half.  There’s just too much detail.  Too many descriptions of military movements, weapon specifics, battle positions, and detailed meetings of Norman Schwarzkopf constantly berating his generals.  I was just mainly bored.  This book actually took me longer to read the book than the actual conflict lasted.  I had to force myself to read ten pages every day just so I could get through with it.

Then there’s the fact that most of this book focuses on the “here and now” and not enough on the causes of the war, and the backgrounds of the countries involved in the conflict.  Some of this is here, but not enough.  Had the author given us more background of the Middle East, and the turbulent histories, it would have made a much better book.  Instead, it seems were transplanted immediately to the battlefield and we immediately start following all the tactical moves in precise detail without really knowing much about the “why”.  This would have helped tremendously since most U.S. citizens had never even heard of Saddam Hussein until Kuwait was invaded.

Then, this book was written very shortly after the conclusion of the war, so there really isn’t any opportunity to reflect back on the conflict, and see where and why things happened the way that they did, and what many of the post war effects actually were.  This probably would have been a better book had it been written five or six years after the conclusion of the war.

The author does give us some insights, however.  He does talk in detail about the “goal” of the war – which was never to destroy Saddam Hussein and his evil regime, but to simply get them to withdraw from Kuwait.  George Bush was very careful about minimizing U.S. casualties, and figured that ousting Hussein would be too costly, and wouldn’t be worth the battle.  Plus, he earnestly believed that, after the war, Iraq would then dispose of their leader via a coup, and that would free the U.S. and its allies from having to do much of the bloody work.  Of course, hindsight now tells us that such judgements were mistaken, but we don’t get to read too much of this here though because, again, this book was written so closely after the war ended.

This book will tell you just about everything that happened during the war on the battlefield, so if that’s your thing, this book gives a great synopsis.  I just wanted “more” of some things, and definitely “less” of others – such as all the meticulous detail.