DDAY wrote:
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In article . com, "FatKat"
wrote:

haven't read the book since the summer of '04) a high-level conference
in the US to inspect parts of one of the defecting Iranian fighters to
determine whether Iran had had access to spare parts despite attrition
and the purported arms embargo. It's an interesting account, dampened

That, to me, sounds highly plausible. US intel would have two primary
interests in examining an Iranian fighter--determining if they had made any
modifications, and determining if the Iranians were getting black market
parts out of the US.

No, I had no problem with the possibility that it might have occurred -
a question I reserve for expressly fictionalized stories. Rather, in
what is supposed to be an actual case history, proof that it had
happened as Coop/Bishop describe. "Iran-Iraq" is an unwieldly tome and
one of its chief fault is one that bedevils most historians - just who
is the book written for? The book details many facts presumably
unknown or not quite appreciated, but also many details of the science
of mil/av that aren't quite clear to the casual reader - mostly the
qualitive differences between various versions of military aircraft.
The other biggest failing is that there's a lot of detail that simply
isn't corroborated, and this is highlighted by those details that
Coop/Bishop do give the laser-scalpel treatment to, like the one about
the Phantom allegedly shotdown by an Iraqui helicopter.

The claims that an F-14 went to Russia have never had any more details than
that. Cooper and Bishop seem to have more details that it happened the
other way.

Which says more about the source than the facts. The authors have
amassed a lot of fact, so much so that the book becomes less a critical
analysis of the war than simply a super-sized abstract of their
research. As such, access to information is critical, and the authors
never become independent of their sources. There's no way to tell
whether the lack of detail is the result of there being no detail, or
the authors' inability to find the information.

by the lack of details, follow-up or attirbution by footnoting. As a
Schiffer book, "Iran Iraq" is unsurprisingly sloppy, so I won't get
into the nitty-gritty as to who bears the fault for the books numerous
structural and stylistic flaws. Suffice it to say that the account of

As I'm sure you know, Schiffer is notorious for typos and other mistakes. I
remember seeing an absurd example of this, where Schiffer reprinted some US
Navy book (possibly a tour book from an aircraft carrier). In one of the
front pages there was some curious disclaimer like "The publisher is not
responsible for any mistakes in this book." Two pages later, they printed a
photograph upside down! It was bizarre and it led me to wonder about their
production process. My suspicion is that their layout people are really
bad.

That's what I mean when I said "as a Schiffer book". Since it was my
first (yet only) book by Cooper, I didn't know that he published other
books with Osprey. I'm surprised that he didn't go to Osprey with this
one - they would probably have been put off by its size, but then he
could have spun it off into several books, much as he's already done
with his books on African Migs and Persian F-14's. As I said above, I
don't care whose fault the end result is, I'm not out to lay blame,
just give the potential reader a heads-up on what they can expect.
BTW, for those who may have read the Amazon.com page for the book, I'm
not the guy who posted as "Sharpest101".

A colleague of mine published a couple of very well-regarded books with
them. He told me that the upside is that they are easy to work with, but
the downside is that they provide no copy editing or quality control
checking at all. This requires the editor to very carefully check the page
proofs. Speaking as someone who publishes a lot myself, typically authors
get very little time to review page proofs, so unless the author is
extremely attentive at that phase, the result will be a crappy Schiffer
book.

I wonder why anybody goes to them. Anyway, my copy lacked many of the
things I would have thought critical in a book about a protracted
conventional war, like maps, diagrams, an index and more color
pictures. Ironically, a small-area map is used for the book's the
dustjacket. Would the book have featured these had Schiffer done their
job? Or did it otherwise reflect the author's efforts? Again, whose
fault isn't my concern.

just find it difficult to make the leap from disloyalty to the Islamic
state to disloyalty to Iran as a whole, which defection would require.

Well, huge wads of cash can also help in changing one's loyalty.

According to the Squadron/Signal book on the F-5, the PRC supposedly
tried to lure Taiwanese pilots into defecting with their aircraft with
promises of a hefty bounty payable in gold. While Taiwanese pilots may
have suspected the reds, there's every reason to believe that even
American-trained pilots would have suspected an American intel op.