Reviews for Impenetrable Fog of War: Reflections on Modern Warfare and Strategic Surprise

The average rating for Impenetrable Fog of War: Reflections on Modern Warfare and Strategic Surprise based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-10-01 00:00:00 Scott Murray Bethlehem is the small town in Israel where Jesus was born on a lowly manger two thousand years ago. This should be enough for the place to command the honor, respect, and peace it deserves. But the place being in the Middle East, things are not as simple as they ought to be. Because in the twentieth century and until today, Bethlehem has been part of the West Bank, Palestinian land that has been part of Israel's Occupied Territories since the Six-Day War in June of 1967. Thus, Bethlehem has seen sporadic bouts of unrest and violence between Israel and the different Palestinian factions and among the factions themselves. The people of Bethlehem, especially its small Christian population, have struggled and survived. Though the future of this land and its people is still hazy, hope never dies that they can find it to be stable and peaceful, much like it was two thousand years ago.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-09-23 00:00:00 Peter Kirby I was ignorant to the specifics of the events that had occurred in Bethlehem in the spring of 2002 until I visited the West Bank with an audacious French photographer in 2004. We experienced the warm hospitality of a number of families in and around Bethlehem who shared both their memories of the Israeli occupation and their accounts of specific events that had incited some (whose relation to them remained ambiguous, of course) to violence. I read A Season in Bethlehem to fill some gaps in my knowledge of the event. In this book, Hammer constructs an account of a sequence of events that climaxes as a siege at the Church of the Nativity and leaves Bethlehem in economic despair. Hammer describes the involvement of the key participants in the intifada and attempts to relate to their personal thoughts and struggles before, during, and after the siege. Though Hammer, like most of us, undoubtedly harbors his own biases and lacks the personal experience to be able to truly empathize with all the characters he describes, I felt I learned a lot about the people and events of the siege from his account.