Customer Reviews

The Iraq War: The Military Offensive, from Victory in 21 Days to the Insurgent Aftermath

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Excellent primer about this modern conflict minus the spin, controversy, and commercial interruptions...

1. John Keegan is without a doubt, one of the most highly respected military historians alive. If you're not familiar with his work, I'd highly recommend The Mask of Command (Alexander the Great, U.S Grant, Wellington, Hitler) and The Face of the Battle. (Waterloo, Somme, Agincourt)

2. In The Iraq War, a short book and quick read, he starts with a brief history of Iraq, the rise of Saddam, the first Gulf War, and the most recent conflict. He ends with a postscript that details event in Iraq as recently as October 2004.

A few points:

In the minds of many, the decision to go to war, the actual conflict, and the handling of recent events is politically charged, controversial, and even questionable in terms of the legitimate use of force. Regardless of your position, this book is a good informative read. Keegan skirts almost all controversy to describe the motives to go war and the execution of the conflict with complete clarity. It's a quick read. He takes you from the allied forces crossing the Kuwait border to the fall of Baghdad in about 40 pages.

The brief section regarding Saddam's rise to power is fascinating. Appendix 2, which is a summation of his discussion with General Franks is also interesting and well organized: esp. Frank's description of the five fronts in Iraq and the use of deceptive operations.

Hardcore fans of Keegan will no doubt be disappointed. (This is the historian with the ability to take you into the minds of Alexander the Great, Wellington, and Adolph Hitler with ease; and describe their campaigns with the same effortless and highly readable prose.

You have to take this book for what it is: a brief expose on the current conflict. Also, towards the end of the book, Keegan even states that not enough time has passed to give the conflict true historical perspective.

If the only thing you know about the Iraq War, Saddam, and the history of Iraq is limited to television news coverage, I'd highly recommend this book.

John Keegan's reputation precedes him. Way back in the late 70s, he wrote the book "The Face of Battle", perhaps one of the most influential books of the modern era on military history. He's gone on since to write a series of topical books on Naval history, the nature of command in war, and other things of that sort, and also to do Conventional histories, of the World Wars and of warfare in general.

This current book is a departure for him. For one thing, it's barely history, dealing with a series of events only a few years past: the war in Iraq, its prelude, course, and aftermath. Keegan provides a succinct history of Iraq prior to Saddam, a thumbnail sketch of the dictator and his career in power, then moves to his wars with Iran and Kuwait. The war itself occupies the last half of the book, with a brief afterward covering the intervening year after the publication of the book. The book has many strengths: notably it's a good primer on the course of Iraqi history prior to the war, and to the Arab world and its view of the West.

If the book has a weakness, it's the fact that the regular, organized segment of the war gave way to the insurgency, which has continued since. While this insurgency isn't strong enough to overwhelm or eject American and Allied forces from Iraq, it is strong enough to inflict casualties and cause some upheaval in the host countries. Part of the difficulty is that things are happening as we speak: the book covers events in the epilog that have occurred in the last few months, elections in Iraq and the adoption of the constitution there.

This proviso aside, this is probably a very good introductory book on the war in Iraq, and I would recommend it.

Great read, exactly what I was looking for! Keegan as always delivers an enjoyable account of the invasion of Iraq and the important backround to the conflict including a bio of Saddam and the history of Turkish rule of the area, great info on the baath party too.

John Keegan's "The Iraq War" is less a blow by blow account of the military campaign against Saddam's Iraq as it is a general history of Saddam's regime and its wars. Keegan looks at the history of Iraq before Saddam and examines its place within the Middle East as Arab nationalist movements take root. Saddam is painted as a bitter, brilliant, ambitious, and ultimately psychopathic dictator whose penchant for underestimating his enemies and supreme confidence in his own flawed judgments led Iraq toward disaster.

Saddam's wars of aggression against Iran and Kuwait are expertly detailed by a master military historian. In addition to the military aspects of the wars, Keegan offers a keen insight into their political origins and resolutions as well. Keegan deftly presents Saddam's motives and and judgments in each conflict and how they influenced his actions in the next.

Keegan's presentation of the 2003 Iraq War offers similar insights. The run up to the war and the preparations against Iraq are examined. Bush and Blair are presented as diligent statesmen, acting on credible evidence of a threat to the Western world from Iraq. Those looking for a treatise packed with Bush-bashing will be disappointed. To be sure, Keegan offers mistakes that these men and others made in the US and Britain, but on the whole it's pretty obvious that Keegan supported the decision for war in 2003 and offers important arguments for this position. The military operations are again detailed with supreme precision and insight. The reader marvels at the ability of the US-British led military to take on Saddam's still credible war machine with such a relatively small force, a force not supported by nearly the numbers of nations that joined the coalition in 1991. Keegan also writes of the lingering effects of the war in the US and Britain, and offers his notes from a post-war interview with US General Tommy Franks.

The scope of this book does not quite fit the title. At just over 200 pages of text one expects this work to be primarily a study of the 2003 Iraq War. Rather, this work presents a grand overview of Iraq's regime under Saddam and its wars. This book also fails to fully consider the insurgency that followed the main military operations. A greater perspective on this issue would have added considerably to this work. Still, these are small complaints compared to what this book does offer.

Up until now, I have been a big fan for John Keegan. I totally enjoyed his early books: Face of Battle, Price of Admiralty, and the Mask of Command. However, success and all the additional opportunities it has brought him must have turned him from a true historian to what is known in Washington as a Talking Head. To a Talking Head, quantity is far more important than quality and this clearly is the case in with this book. Every fact about UNSCOM that Mr. Keegan mentions is wrong. For example, Mr. Keegan states that the IAEA action teams were less demanding than UNSCOM and goes on to say that the "brave Dr. David Kay" led the UNSCOM teams. Actually Kay--who I have very little respect for, but that is a different story--was an IAEA inspector. Keegan also repeatedly says that Iraq fired 150 mile SCUDs at Israel and Saudi Arabia; another ill-informed fact since such a missile could not hit Israel from Iraq. (And Keegan repeats it several times, each time quoting the 150 mile range.) Instead, Saddam fired 300 mile Al Husseins. This seems like a minor point but it was key to Saddam's programs on weapons of mass destruction.
The question Im left asking myself is: if all the facts in this book that I know about are wrong, what about the other statements Keegan makes that I don't have first hand information about? Im afraid that Keegan has flubbed the first rule for historians: get your facts right and then worry about how good a read it is. Find some other book to read about the Second Gulf War, this one is too deeply flawed.

In this 219 pp book, Keegan goes on for 125 pp about events that led up to the war, and many events that he should have left out. This is so poorly done I can not recommend it. Did the publishers just tell JK to write whatever he wanted and they would print it? Reminds me of the old guy at a party you meet that just has to tell you way too much detail about something he likes to talk about, and never gets to the point. AVOID!

Keegan started out years ago with a bang with The Face of Battle, in which the post-Vietnam and, for the UK, a post-Empire spirit made for a genuinely innovative military history.

This early promise has NOT been fulfilled, and Keegan has declined considerably in quality because he's become co-opted by the Establishment, a post-Empire, Blair establishment every bit as corrupt as Haig.

Keegan has never served in combat yet loftily recommended in the 1980s that the "tempo" of the next war (which as a Sandhurst insider he was probably planning) be increased to 24/7. In this, he gave NO consideration to the high levels of post-traumatic stress and the war crimes that have resulted from the US policy of "no sleep until Baghdad" in the second Iraq war.

Keegan is post-Sixties, all right, but instead of peace and love, he's a Nietzchean who'd wage war with the poor man's body.

His "war" is chateau generalship by the rich, actually fought, 24/7, by British working class lads, blackfellows from Britain's few remaining colonies, and of course Americans.

Keegan popularized and made respectable for a new generation the old lie, subtly and over time, dulce et decorum. Precisely by foregrounding war's utter brutality he made it somehow acceptable and ONCE AGAIN a test of manhood, and this has gotten people killed.

His book on Military Intelligence managed, idiotically, to dismiss MI as secondary and not critical precisely, almost to the day, when the American and British MI was declaring victory (remember Mission Accomplished?) and failing to see how disbanding the Iraqi army would create the insurgency.

The Iraq War recounts the war as a board game with neither any anticipation of the postwar mess nor any compassion whatsoever for the men and women who fought it, or the Iraqis brutalized. At key points, it expresses a puzzlement about the failure of Iraqis to greet their "liberators" which shows a willful incomprehension of anything outside military science.

Ignore all writings by John Keegan until he issues a public apology for the lives this twit has destroyed while sipping pink gin at Sandhurst. For a good history of the Iraq War cf. Thomas E. Ricks, THE IRAQ WAR.