A Desert Called Peace - Military Sci-Fi Novel by Tom Kratman | Baen Science Fiction Book (2010) | Perfect for Fans of Space Opera & Political Thrillers

This book is split. Part of it is devoted to describing how you train and then fight a modern infantry force in the late twentieth century against insurgencies in built-up areas. The other part is given over as a vehicle for the author to expound on his theories about how terrible Marxism, Socialism, Extremist Islam, bleeding-heart liberalism, the media is and how the war in Iraq was mishandled and could have been done better. In the lead in to the book, the author states that this book is not a commentary on any current events, but it starts with Moslem terrorists flying aircraft into skyscrapers, and ends with an infantry attack on a town that is described a lot like Fallujah. The veil is extremely thin.The part that is concerned with the purely military actions like the training aspects or the combat scenes are told well. The author must have been in some of this type of training, read about it enough, or spoken with people who have to be able to describe it like he does. Same goes for the combat scenes that he describes. These parts of the books are fun to read and are the worthwhile parts of the book and elevate my rating.The parts where he gives vent to his political rants are the parts of the book that are where he loses rating points. While you can debate some of this political views on whether communist workers can really be turned around as quickly as he says once they are given the proper incentives, or whether Arab societies will take verdant tropical lands and turn them into deserts if given half a chance, the more despicable parts of his writings are when he turns to justifying torture and assassinations as legitimate tools in the fight against terrorism. At this point he crossed a line and gone down the slippery slope. He obviously knows this as he appends an Afterword to justify it. In it he claims that torture is justified because it works, and saves the greatest good. However, his justification of why it works uses tortured logic and is not convincing. He never even tries to attempt to justify how being uber-terrorists is betterAnother thing that comes into play is that the author places this book about 600 years in the future when we have space ships flying to remote stars, but the weapons being used are from the late 20th Century. That’s such a huge miss that it has to be commented upon.Putting it all together, the parts that are fun to read are totally outweighed by the parts that are pure nonsense, leading to a two star rating.