Just finished reading Ignorant Armies by Gwynne Dyer, and I'd like to recommend it as a very interesting and informative read. I've found it an excellent source of background on the current current situation in the Middle East – useful especially for anyone who, like me, considers the war currently being waged by the United States against Iraq evil and stupid, in that order, and would like some help getting their thoughts in order as to why this is so.

The book has some problems. It won't have a very long shelf life, for one thing, since it was written over the course of three to four weeks beginning in January of this year, and rushed into print. What I find particularly unfortunate is that, having been slapped together so quickly, it has no footnotes. This makes it hard to know how seriously to take some of Dyer's more interesting allegations, such as about the role the US played in Saddam's infamous gassing of a Kurdish village (the exact same event that President Bush and his friends have trumpeted so loudly in justification of their invasion). Also (and this may be my fault), I don't quite know, except by reputation, what his qualifications are to evaluate the relative destructive capabilities of biological and chemical, as opposed to nuclear, weapons (all of which the US has lumped into the catch-all category of “weapons of mass destruction”).

He does have a lot to say, though, about the difference between the United States' approach to at least two of the three members of the “axis of evil”: Iraq, a country which by this point likely does not have any significant WMD capability (and certainly not nuclear weapons), versus North Korea, which does have nuclear weapons and likely an increasing capacity to deliver them to their targets. In a related vein, Dyer also has some tart words about Bush sycophant and expatriate Canadian David Frum, and the dangers of allowing speechwriters to make policy.

Altogether, the book comes across less as a serious scholarly examination or even a work of journalism than as a nicely coherent collection of obervations and opinions by a lone, but rather well-informed, observer. Recommended reading – just don't wait too long to buy or borrow a copy.