Perspective of world affairs from a leading Marine commander ( )

This is by far my favorite of the "Tom Clancy and some general" book series he has been writing for the past couple of years. Once you get past the minimal self-promotion, you have a solid piece of work that summarizes a career spent in service to our nation.

The pessimist in you will wonder if his take on a lot of the issues presented is revisionist. Did he really have that kind of foresight when it came to the Middle East? I tend to think that he actually did. He's fair in his assessment of the Clinton and Bush(43) administrations. I don't know what his politics are and I don't really care. So many of these political/military memoirs are full of white-washing and outright distortions so as to cast the author in the best light. They'll go after whoever they feel slighted them and make it appear as if they are the only ones who knew what needed to be done, etc. I didn't get that impression from Tony Zinni. I really think he was fair in his treatment of the presidents that he served under. However, I can sense that he was less than thrilled with some of the other generals. I can't say that I blame him, and as a former military man myself, I can only imagine the politics he had to deal with on his level. I saw it as well, and I was many, many levels below him in terms of rank and responsibilities. I came away from the book liking a man that I didn't really know a whole lot about.

If there was a part of the book that was my favorite, it would be his experiences in Vietnam. Finally, someone gives credit to the elements of the South Vietnamese army that fought just as valiantly as our own American military members. Tony Zinni is a patriot and we owe a lot to a man who gave a significant portion of his life in defense of his country. I almost wish he would have written his own book instead of collaborating with Clancy. He is much more believeable in his words than in the words of Clancy or Koltz. I say that after having read almost every single book Clancy has put out. He is one of the few(I can count them on 1 hand) authors whose fiction books I will actually read.

I highly recommend this book. I learned alot from General Zinni's perspective of events over the last 40 years. ( )

This is the first non-fiction work from Tom Clancy that I’ve read. It’s the fourth Commander books he’s written, after Into the Storm, Shadow Warrior and Every Man A Tiger. Each (like this one) is some kind of a semi-autobiography of a certain (retired) general from the US Armed Forces.

In Battle Ready, Clancy’s source is General Tony Zinni, a battle-hardened soldier who started his illustrious career in the US Marine. The book is divided into eight chapters, almost in parallel with his various assignments. I really enjoy the first five chapters of the book, because they offer a vivid, front-seat and astounding recollection of Zinni’s experiences in the Vietnamese jungles and swamps, Okinawa camps, Turkish/Northern Iraqi’s barren land and Somalia. Most of his duties were classified as Operations Other Than War (OOTW), that have been seen as the most advanced models for military-civil operations, peacekeeping and humanitarian missions. Zinni’s surely one of the US Armed Forces who is fortunate enough to excel in OOTW.

I guess I’m more into combat actions and field operations, so I felt kinda bored when I read the remaining chapters. As he kept getting steady promotions, Zinni became more involved in the more abstract, conceptual, management thingies. Yeah, I gotta admit he has numerous ideas – ranging from how to improve the Marine’s role to how the US military should deal with non-state actors – that are quite creative and carefully thought, however, too much reflections (self, institutional, global) got me dozed off a few times. Anyway, I still concur with his opinion that the US Government does not really have a grasp on their own New World Order concept. That is why US post-Cold War global engagements were not really succesful. Many lives have been saved throughout all those so-called humanitarian interventions, yes, but the real underlying problems: poverty, ethnic strife, religious fanaticism, corruption, totalitarianism and many more remain.

Zinni’s previous commands such as the Deputy Director of Operations, US European Command (EUCOM), Director of Operations, Somalia Task Force and Commanding General, I Marine Expeditionary Force, made him well-acquainted with diverse crises all over the world. After his retirement, he does not stop saving the world. He became a “warrior diplomat” who was involved in a variety of peacemaking efforts, most notably in Aceh, Pakistan and of course, the Middle East. That is so frickin’ cool. How this guy can absorb all the knowledge he has now and how he gets a knack of mastering both the arts of fighting and diplomacy is an alluring mystery to me.

Well, I reckon no matter how many times I got dozed off, this book still rocks. Not many people like Zinni in this world, that’s for sure, thus reading his memoir has a privilege of its own. ( )

Battle, one of the few things that humans crave to make their lives worthwhile. For Tony Zinni it was his life. For a man that started out in the marines during the Vietnam war, he is an absolutely brilliant man who used the experience he gained in the field behind his desk in Washington as the Commander in chief at CENTCOM from the late nineties to the year two-thousand. This Brilliant man was the one who began the rage against Saddam Hussein during the Clinton administration and was able to make a very difficult decision to continue with U2 surveillance or take out the possible WMD complexes within Iraq. He made the right decision for the battle, but not for the rest of the war.
His intention was not to initiate the fall of Saddam Hussein although he saw it coming, instead he just wanted to make the United States feel a little safer having relations in the Middle East. He won his first battle, but started the war. Operation Iraqi Freedom started prior to 9-11-01 despite the thoughts of most uninformed people. Unfortunately, it may have been what confirmed the “go ahead” on the 9-11 plot. Zinni was on of the main leaders of the first part of Operation Iraqui Freedom, but retired before the end of it. He manipulated the leaders of this country into thinking the only thing to do was to send the army in to re-build it. This was one of his bad decisions, because it was not our mess, we did not cause the fall of Saddam Hussein so we should not be the ones to clean it up.
The Choices that this man made during his years as Commander in Chief at CENTCOM we for the short-term benefit of this country. In the long term he set us up to fail. He was a wise and brilliant man, but he only thought about the “now” instead of the future. He describes the life of his son by saying that he and his generation made a complete mess out of the Middle East, and that his son's generation would have to clean it up. This is a statement that one hundred percent of the United States is forced to agree with, whether they truly agree or not. ( )