Review: A Major Dissent
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 01 3, 2013
I can see why many here enjoyed this book to the tune of four or five stars but for me, it failed on many different levels. If you are like me, it will most likely fail for you too. I'll try to convey my issues without any spoilers, but that restriction makes my task difficult.The setup is that the US has been supplying Turkey with weapons which Turkey has been using to exterminate Kurds. At one point, the book states that thousands of Kurd towns were destroyed with no telling how many Kurds were killed. Unable to stop the Kurds using these tactics, the Turks called for US support. In response, the US invaded and occupied Turkey to the purpose of suppressing the Kurdish objection to being exterminated. As a retaliation for the US supplying arms to the Turks and now for the US soldiers actively assisting in the genocide, some Kurds infiltrate the US to start a campaign of terror to get the US out of the Turkish / Kurdish fight. This is the setup and bluntly, at that point, I was ready to drop this book as perhaps too depressing to continue just due to this scenario. I mean, who is the bad guy at this point?Well, the author makes sure that the Kurds in the US are painted as so evil that you must side against them, but I keep thinking of those thousands of Kurdish villages so casually dismissed in this book on the way to making the Kurds and the leader of the terror campaign evil incarnate. Don't get me wrong. I have no tolerance for terror, but also have none for genocide either. The book offers a choice of nauseating alternatives for the good guys.As to the unfolding of the story (FBI and allies to stop the terror campaign) a good deal of the 'action' is laughable. Here are a few examples I can cite without spoilers. If I were willing to do spoilers, this review would be thousands of words long and a lot funnier.The Kurds are depicted as heartless superbly trained killers yet when they use a captive to lure others into a trap, they untie the captive sufficiently to allow him to signal his rescuers that this is a trap. In another scene, the gimlet eyed Kurdish assassin is charged with stalking and killing a victim. Rather than just shooting the victim, the assassin, in the best James Bond tradition, grabs the proposed victim up, puts her in a car and aimlessly drives around long enough for her to engineer an escape. In another gripping scene, this trained and expert assassin shoots a victim (with a 9 mm pistol) at close range, in the back of the head but she not only lives through it, but doesn't even seem to have much of a headache.In another asinine setup, the FBI needs to question a bunch of good old boys in a country bar to find the location of another country boy who may know the location of the terrorists. A reasonable tactic would be entering the bar and just saying "We're the FBI looking for the terrorists. Can you tell us the address of So and So?" That would have worked, but instead, the FBI female dresses up in costume to use sex to winnow the address from one of the bar's patrons. When that doesn't work, the FBI (and FBI ally) end up shooting, beating and terrorizing the patrons until they get the info they seek. Yikes! These guys are rednecks from Arizona. If you asked, they'd take up arms and attack the terrorists themselves. No need to shoot and beat them.One more example. After the terrorism starts in the US, the law enforcement community starts a manhunt, of course, to find the terrorists. They can't find them but when the Maryland mafia decides it wishes to find them, it does so in about 15 minutes with no explanation except an oblique comment about tracking them through their sewage. After the mafia finds the bad guys locale, it fails to inform the FBI for most of the book which gives the bad guys some more time to commit atrocities.I haven't even gotten to the superhuman powers some FBI agents have or the utter stupidity supposedly committed by senior White House staff - all utterly unbelievable.If you just want to rah rah the US and  can dismiss the portrayed genocide of Kurds and can suspend disbelief when superhuman FBI agents get stymied by bozo Kurd terrorists, this one is for you. If you are sickened by the killing, then perhaps not.