I haven't made up my mind how I feel about the book's portrayal of Israel's Prime Minister. Part of me wants to say that the book oversimplifies the character to a form of caraciture. Another part of me views Ariel Sharon as an example of a caraciture. I'm sure that some people will feel that Israel is portrayed too positively, some too negatively. The primary focus of the book is really on the men and women on the ground, in the jets, and in the tanks. The rest of the story is told to drive the plot forward, but the author's passion seems to be in the heat of the action. Despite all of the problems with the plot related to current events, the action scenes still worked very well. When reading about dogfights, the fact that some of the pilots were Iraqi didn't seem to interrupt the flow of the scenes.

It is to the author's credit that the Iraqi pilots, at least those not in leadership positions, were no more simplisticly or negatively portrayed than our protagonists, the Israeli and American fighters. Overall, the book is good, so long as you don't react to the rosy view of soldiers common to the genre.

H.M.S. Unseen by Patrick Robinson
H.M.S. Unseen was written in 1999, and suffers much less from comparison with current events. While this book also deals with Iraq and other countries in the middle east, it is set three years in our future, so the events are slightly more plausible. Also, while there is one plot point that deals specifically with intrigue between Iraq and Iran, generally the players can be seen as generically Arab, and America does still have enemies that would like to strike out in terrorist acts and be able to deny it.

The H.M.S. Unseen is a submarine, stolen and fitted with missles capable of knocking a jet out of the sky. Which it does, leaving the world to wonder what on earth happened. This novel is less concerned about the details of military actions, focusing instead on the higher-level political considerations as high-ranking British and American officers figure out the problem and narrow in on the antagonist. Unseen is almost more a spy novel than a military thriller, and I'll try not to give away too much when I say that at some point, an independent spy runs out of places where he is welcome.