middle east

Raid on the Sun is more than an explanation of the successful 1981 Israeli Air Force (IAF) attack on Iraq's al-Tuwaitha atomic bomb factory near Baghdad. The book is also a historical and contemporary explanation of Middle East politics and Israeli and United States politics in particular. The book is easy to read - good flow, a good war story, and creates admiration for those flying a high risk air attack.

Too many books about Israel are propaganda overwhelming context. By contrast, author Rodger Claire is exceptionally objective and though some sources may be questionable, he definitively explains his sources in endnotes.

The main story is an operationally detailed description of the attack from inception, political decision making, planning, intelligence, deception of the United States, the bombing run, right to the political aftermath. It's a good story well told and often from the pilot's point of view - the reader is often in the cockpit. The author also sets the context for the attack by explaining the duplicity, profit, and conspiracy of the French government to provide a bomb making nuclear capability to both Israel and Iraq [and now Iran]. Jacques Chirac is front and center. There are the usual Israeli jabs at the structured United States military and equipment. Demonstrably, the United States Air Force F-16 aircraft, the versatile fueling modifications, and training though not intended for this attack made the attack possible. You'll read about the IAF pilot unable to correctly use his navigation equipment, attacking the target off course, flying a 360 degree loop with full bomb load to successfully realign on the target. The F-16 is a great aircraft. A Mirage would have come apart at the rivets.

There's a bonus in this book. The author offers the usual apologia about the deliberate attack on the U.S. Navy electronic spy ship Liberty [much earlier in the 1967 Mid East War] and the profuse regrets by the Israeli government (yea, right). But, here's the surprise. The Israeli Air Force pilot, Iftach Spector, who led the Liberty attack that killed and wounded about fifty American sailors, strafing life rafts as well, was also the squadron commander of the unit attacking the Iraqi nuclear facility. Spector presumably has a vision problem. He couldn't see the United States flag on the Liberty and was the only pilot to completely miss the Iraqi nuclear target.

Credit the author, Claire, for his candidness. Most books by Israelis about the Israeli military paint a too self-flattering picture - best this, best that, best everything. Claire shows all the flaws. There's the puerile squadron commander, the one who can't bomb the target, successfully demanding he replace a junior pilot scheduled and trained for the mission. There's the ego centrism about who will lead the mission, abysmal operations and communications and KH-11 security, navigation errors, and the arrogance shown to US Air Force Air Police when the pilots were training in the States. There's a sense of arrogance about anything American - they violated the treaty with their best ally -- seemingly always manipulating the United States commitment to Israel. The excuse is sovereignty as to opposed to fidelity. Israel claims the best military intelligence in the world but they flew right over the King of Jordan's yacht on the way to Baghdad as the King alerted his own Air Defense. Of course the IAF avoided the formidable Iraqi Air Defense. But give us a break, the Iraqi Air Defense units shut down all their SAM and ZSU AAA systems to go to dinner right before the attack. Scrambling to get the last flight of Israeli F-16's, the Iraqi ZSU 23 crews stupidly fired their cannon rounds into other ZSU 23 crews. Lucky the IAF wasn't flying against the North Vietnamese. Confounded by world wide condemnation, Prime minister Begin responding publicly, confused, thinking he's describing the Iraqi nuclear facility instead mistakenly reveals the location of Israel's storage sight for Israel's 100 plus nuclear weapons 120 feet below the Israeli reactor at Dimona. Those are the weapons Israel denied. If you get the sense this wasn't a model operation, you're right.

The author draws a final conclusion that the 1981 attack on al-Tuwaitha was the inspiration and legacy of the aggressive and preemptive Bush administration's strategic doctrine of preemption or "preventive war" against Iraq. A strategy advocated by Vice President Chaney, and his neoconservatives in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans , (specifically Dep. Sec. of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Under Secretary Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, and Pentagon and Likud (Israel's leading right wing party] policy advisor Richard Richard Perle.) Maybe so.

This book will get you thinking. Despite all the world criticism endured by Israel for the attack, it just may have saved Allied troops from nuclear weapons in the Wars with Iraq.

With the cooperation of all of the major players involved, Rodger Claire is able to bring to life the incredible events behind Israel's destruction of Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981. The book is a pleasure to read, with Claire providing all of the relevant underlying details and facts without taking away from a thrilling human story. The security of Israel is safeguarded through the brave actions of the eight Israeli Air Force pilots as well as the hundreds of people who helped to plan and execute the mission. This timely book serves as a clear reminder that evil does exist and that good people everywhere need to be prepared to take action to put that evil down. There was no peaceful rationale for the reactor and yet the world let the French sale go through. Our inability to take action in North Korea is the ultimate reminder that the Israeli's were absolutely right in their actions. A wonderful story, very well written and easily read in a few hours. Highly recommended, especially given current world events

Raid on the Sun is fascinating, enthralling, and a quick read. I received it in the mail on a Saturday afternoon and finished it by Sunday night.

Some reasons I liked it:

The book is objective. While the book clearly celebrates the destruction of Saddam's nuclear facility, the Israelis are shown in the book to be ruthless and almost paranoid at times. The Mossad, Irael's version of the CIA, kills almost without conscience, all over the world. The book doesn't shy away from the "innocent" Frenchman who was killed in the attack on the Osirak reactor. Rodger Claire details the duplicity Israel used in fooling its most trusted and closest ally, the United States, in order to gain better information and equipment. In other words, it is not simply a white-washed pro-Israeli book. It gives both sides, which is nice.

However, it does portray the Israelis as misunderstood heroes who were perhaps ahead of their time in understanding the threat of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. At the time, the United States officially condemned Israel for the strike, but clearly it was a gutsy move that the U.S. increasingly appreciates to this day.

The book has a good pace. It's not merely about a bombing mission. It goes into how the mission was meticulously planned, how the pilots trained and prepared, how intelligence was gathered all over the world, and how internal political changes in France, Iran, Israel, and the United States factored into the crafting of the plan.

I almost wish the book were longer and more in-depth; its brevity is one of its strengths and weaknesses all at once. The abbreviations are profuse, but there is a guide to them at the beginning of the book. After a a few dozen pages, the abbreviations (AAA, GCI, KH-11, MH-84, SAM, etc.) become easier to immediately identify and understand.

I would definitely recommend this book to just about anyone, because it sheds some light on the way things are in the world today, and because it is a real thriller of a book. Weapons of mass destruction were not some mythical and fabricated justification for war in Iraq, based on the history in the region. Intelligence experts in 2002-2003 had good reason to believe the worst of Saddam Hussein and his progress at "going nuclear," given his past. The book details Saddam Hussein's quest for nuclear weapons, as well as his motives for seeking them, dating back to the early 1970s.

I wish it had expanded on some of the Mossad activities, more of the political machinations, more of the policy ramifications, and more of the individual lives of the key players. In general, there could be much more amplification. But it is still an amazing book, and one you can probably finish on a plane ride or at the beach one afternoon.