A Soldier's Perspective

CJ A BETTER COUNTRY: Why America Was Right To Confront Iraq (A Book Review)

I think I’ve been pretty open and honest about my support for our decision to go to war with Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein and his Ba’ath Party from power. This thinking comes from my personal experiences of combat at the outset of the war and subsequent operations within Baghdad and Fallujah. Obviously, there is still a great deal of information contained within my mind that I may not ever be able to share due for classification and operational security reasons.

While protecting information I’m entrusted to protect, I’ve sought diligently for open source information (publicly available) and recently declassified memorandums to prove my point. Some people will just never be convinced that President Bush indeed did a good thing in going into Iraq. Some people have been convinced but are too prideful to change their minds and admit that maybe we knew what we were doing. I was so excited when I was offered a chance to review this book.

In his latest book, A Better Country: Why America Was Right To Confront Iraq, author Arthur Bordon dissects all the facts surrounding both the decision and intelligence to go to war and the subsequent rearview mirror partisan nature of opposition to it all. Using common sense and well-researched facts to back up his shared belief that President Bush will be exonerated of blame for going to war with Iraq.

Bordon offers in-depth proofs and details descriptions of both sides of the argument leading up to and including the decision to invade Iraq. He acknowledges the mistakes made and provides real explanations as to why. His well footnoted book looks back at history and explains that President Bush really didn’t do anything different than every President since Jimmy Carter.

Those of you who disagree with me on this subject may be saying to yourself, “this is just another Republican piece of propaganda designed to protect the failed Bush legacy.” What readers would be surprised to learn is that Mr. Bordon is a lifelong Democrat. In the preface of his book, he writes:

This book was started in September 2002, when I was appalled at the opposition of my party, the Democrats, to the war looming over the horizon. As a corporate lawyer, I had no knowledge of Iraq other than media reports on the defense of Kuwait. But in studying the Carter Doctrine, the speeches and press conference of George H.W. Bush, and Kenneth Pollack’s book “The Threatening Storm”, I came to understand the extraordinary threat that Saddam presented to the U.S. and its access to Gulf Oil.

That’s right, he admits that there are elements of our access to oil that factored into the decision. The same elements that have existed for decades in our national security policy. Bordon discusses how the Democrats and anti-war elites in this country lost their way and used "revisionist history" to tear apart the Bush administration piece by piece with smoke and mirrors. They used the American public's ignorance and laziness (my words, not Bordon's) to lay out an intentionally false AND misleading campaign to win campaign points. It worked.

A Better Country is good reading for both supporters of the war in Iraq and its critics. Supporters of the the war will finally have all the evidences and footnotes to real facts conveniently located in small book. It will quickly become required reading for anyone willing and active in combating the anti-war movement with truth and a reference book to be read often. The anti-war crowd, if truly interested in learning, will read the book and realize that while it may be okay to oppose war on a moral basis, their standard talking points handed down by their liberal, defeatist talking heads are actually wrong.