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

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.

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.

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.