Keegan has long been revered as a brilliant military historian with a gift for recounting the individual experiences of battle while simultaneously explaining broader strategic objectives. However, this compact and superbly written work is not strictly a military history of "Operation Iraqi Freedom." Approximately half of the narrative focuses on the creation and evolution of the modern Iraqi state in the twentieth century. Keegan makes the compelling argument that Iraq, traditionally divided along religious, ethnic, and tribal lines, has never been a nation in the usually accepted sense of the term. The unity of Iraq has been maintained at gunpoint. The portrait here of Hussein is both fascinating and chilling, the author capturing the aura of paranoia and grandiose fantasy with which he surrounded himself. Keegan offers some tantalizing tidbits on the diplomatic maneuvers as Washington moved toward war, and the Bush administration strived to patch together a "coalition." He describes the war itself with his usual elan and skill, drawing striking differences between this campaign and the Gulf War. As Keegan shows, in some areas the Iraqi military virtually melted away. Unfortunately, as we now see on a daily basis, many of their small arms either went with them or fell into the hands of more committed fighters. Essential reading for understanding the ongoing conflict. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“The best military historian of our generation.”
—Tom Clancy
“While it is difficult to examine any on-going conflict in a vacuum, there will come a day when the battles stand alone. When that day comes, Keegan’s book will be judged the first and best on the subject.”
—Calgary Sun
“A brief outline that is authoritative (at least until further details will be known) and is more on the state of affairs on the other side of the hill, in Iraq, about which we know little.”
—Los Angeles Times
“What his account lacks in ground-level details, it more than makes up for with a panoramic perspective befitting the best-known (and perhaps the best, period) military historian in the world.”
—The Washington Post
From the Trade Paperback edition.
About the Author
John Keegan’s books include Intelligence in War and The Mask of Command. He is the defense editor of The Daily Telegraph (London). He lives in Wiltshire, England.
From The Washington Post
Amid the painful news from Iraq, it's comforting to cast one's mind back long, long ago . . . a year ago, to be precise, when Anglo-American arms appeared triumphant, the Baathists were defeated, and a bright new day was dawning for a long-oppressed people. John Keegan takes us back to the not-so-long-ago world where it could reasonably be said -- as he says on page one -- that "The Iraq War of 2003 was exceptional in both beginning well for the Anglo-American force that waged it and ending victoriously." True enough, if one defines the war in narrow terms, as the 21-day period between March 20 and April 9, 2003, when coalition forces raced from Kuwait to Baghdad. Unfortunately, that seems to be the way that U.S. military planners defined their task, giving insufficient thought to what would happen after Saddam Hussein fell. We still don't know the answer to that question, and, while it's possible that everything will work out fine, it seems less probable today than it was when the world watched Saddam's statue fall in Firdaus Square.
Keegan provides a vivid account of how we got here, emphasizing the coalition's successes, though he touches upon some failures in a concluding chapter. Unlike many other authors of instant histories of the Iraq War, Keegan was not embedded with the allied forces. What his account lacks in ground-level details, it more than makes up for with a panoramic perspective befitting the best-known (and perhaps the best, period) military historian in the world.
He does not get to the actual Iraq War until more than halfway through The Iraq War. The first part of the book is devoted to a summary of prewar Iraqi history -- a task that no one has undertaken more elegantly or intelligently. He begins with ancient Mesopotamia and marches briskly through Ottoman rule, the British creation of Iraq from three Ottoman provinces in the 1920s, Iraq's peaceful days as a constitutional monarchy, the 1958 military coup that inaugurated a time of troubles, the rise of Saddam Hussein in the 1970s, his wars of aggression against Iran and Kuwait and his comeuppance in the 1991 Gulf War. Keegan is unsparing in his depiction of the "violent and self-centered" dictator who was "a monster of cruelty and aggression." He then spends a chapter chronicling "The Crisis of 2002-03" which preceded Saddam's final downfall, in which the author's sympathies clearly lie with Tony Blair and George W. Bush, not with Jacques Chirac and other opponents of the war.
All this is by way of appetizer. The main course is three chapters chronicling the three weeks of major combat. Keegan provides a fluent narrative, informed by a lengthy interview he conducted afterward with the coalition commander, Gen. Tommy Franks. The blow-by-blow account of how the 3rd Infantry Division and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force blitzkrieged their way to Baghdad does not contain much that is new for those who closely followed press coverage of the war. The chapter on "The British War," on the other hand, does contain a good deal of information that will be fresh to most American readers.
Keegan is properly laudatory of the capabilities of the U.S. armed forces, many of which, he points out, cannot be matched by their poorer British cousins. But he also stresses that the British played an integral role, contributing "almost a third of the coalition force deployed," as well as with "their long experience of pacification operations." That knowledge was put to good use by the British commander, Maj. Gen. Robin Brims, in his handling of Basra, Iraq's second-largest city. He cleverly avoided a block-by-block fight, choosing instead to cordon off the city while compiling intelligence on the exact location of Baathist fighters. By the time a full-scale assault was launched on April 6, 2003, Basra fell with little damage to civilians. The British immediately "began to adopt a postwar mode": "they took off their helmets and flak jackets, dismounted from their armoured vehicles and began to mingle with the crowds."
That soft approach is relatively easy to follow in an area populated by friendly Shiites; it's much harder to act that way in the Sunni Triangle, where the U.S. military has suffered the bulk of its casualties in the past year. While Keegan is mildly critical of some U.S. missteps, he ends the book with a ringing defense of the war, which, he writes, made "the world . . . undoubtedly a safer place." Let us hope that subsequent events do not invalidate that cheerful conclusion.
Reviewed by Max Boot
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1: A Mysterious War
Some wars begin badly. Some end badly. The Iraq War of 2003 was exceptional in both beginning well for the Anglo-American force that waged it and ending victoriously. The credit properly belonged in both cases to the American part of the coalition. It was the Americans who provided the majority of strength on the ground and overwhelmingly the majority in the air and at sea. The British contribution was important and warmly welcomed by the Americans but it was that of an esteemed junior partner.
The war was not only successful but peremptorily short, lasting only twenty-one days, from 20 March to 9 April. Campaigns so brief are rare, a lightning campaign so complete in its results almost unprecedented. For comparisons one has to reach back to the ‘cabinet wars’ of the nineteenth century, Prussia’s victory over Austria in six weeks in 1866 or over the French field army in less than a month in 1870. Walkovers, as by the Germans in the Balkans in 1941, do not count. The Iraqis had fielded a sizeable army and had fought, after a fashion. Their resistance had simply been without discernible effect. The Americans came, saw, conquered. How?
While reporting the war in The Daily Telegraph I frequently found myself writing that its events were ‘mysterious’. It was a strange word for a military analyst to use in what should have been objective comment. Even in retrospect, however, I see no reason to look for another. The war was mysterious in almost every aspect. Mystery shrouded the casus belli, the justification for going to war. The war was launched because Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq, refused to co-operate with United Nations inspectors in their search for his forbidden weapons of mass destruction. Yet even after his defeat laid the whole territory of Iraq open to search, such weapons eluded discovery. Mystery surrounded the progress of operations. Iraq fielded an army of nearly 400,000 soldiers, equipped with thousands of tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery pieces. Against the advance of an invading force only half its size, the Iraqi army faded away. It did not fight at the frontier, it did not fight at the obvious geographical obstacles, it scarcely fought in the cities, it did not mount a last-ditch defence of the capital, where much of the world media predicted that Saddam would stage his Stalingrad.
The régime, so bombastic in speech before and during the conflict, mysteriously failed to take elementary defensive precautions. In a country of great rivers, the Euphrates and Tigris pre-eminently but also their tributaries, it failed to destroy the bridges, or even in many cases to prepare them for demolition. While the regular army and the vaunted Republican Guard apparently demobilized themselves, the soldiers disappearing to their homes at the appearance of the invaders, their place was taken by mysterious ‘fighters’ of the skimpiest military training, devotees of the ruling Ba’athist party or foreign Islamicists with an urge to die. Perhaps most mysteriously of all, much of the population of Iraq, the ordinary town dwellers and country people, exhibited a complete indifference to the war going on around them, carrying on their everyday lives apparently oblivious of its dangers. To the bewilderment and fury of the coalition soldiers, traffic often travelled as normal, civilian cars and trucks proceeding headlong into the middle of firefights and stopping only if shot at, by young soldiers terrified that the driver might be a suicide bomber.
Mystery ultimately enfolded the fall of the régime. Following the capture and occupation of Baghdad on 9–10 April, no trace of the government could be found. Not only was there no large number of prisoners of war, the usual index of victory, there were equally no captured generals or staff officers nor, most puzzlingly of all, politicians treating for peace. The Ba’ath leaders and their party officials had disappeared, just as the army and the Republican Guard had disappeared. The disappearance of the soldiers was easily explained. They had taken off their uniforms and become civilians again. The disappearance of the leaders was baffling. It was understandable that, fearing retribution for the crimes of the régime, summarily at the hands of the population, judicially by process of the conquerors, the principal perpetrators and their associates should seek to make their escape; but where had they gone? The American high command distributed packs of cards, each bearing the photographic image of a wanted man. The distribution yielded results. The owlish Tariq Aziz, Deputy Prime Minister, was arrested. So were a number of other important if less prominent Saddam apparatchiks. On 22 July 2003 Saddam Hussein’s sons Qusay and Uday, both steeped in the brutality against political opponents which was their father’s trademark, were betrayed, by the inducement of a $15 million reward, and killed during a gun battle in the northern city of Mosul. Kurdistan might have been thought an ill-chosen hiding place for the dictator’s sons. One of the most extreme Islamicist terror organizations, Ansar al-Islam, had however set up what amounted to a ‘liberated zone’ in Kurdistan, so perhaps encouraging the two thugs – whom Saddam had hardened to their inheritance by sending them to witness torture and executions – to seek refuge there.
The final mystery of the whereabouts of the dictator himself persisted. In the immediate aftermath of the defeat rumours circulated that he had made his escape to a friendly Muslim country. The rumours were cumulatively discounted. Such stable régimes, Libya or Syria, as might have been willing to welcome him were also prudently cautious of the danger of offending the United States. Countries where anti-Americanism flourished, such as Yemen or Somalia, were judged too unstable for Saddam to risk his survival in their turbulent politics. The occupation authority in Iraq eventually concluded that he remained within the country, probably hidden by family or tribal supporters in his home area around Tikrit. Frequent searches were mounted without result. A more methodical procedure proved productive. An intelligence team, by working through his family tree, identified the whereabouts in the Tikrit neighbourhood of residents who might be sheltering him. On 13 December 2003 a party of American troops from the 4th Infantry Division, revisiting a farm already searched but now with better information, uncovered the entrance to an underground hiding place. When the trapdoor was lifted, a bedraggled and heavily bearded Saddam was found cowering inside. He held up his hands and announced, ‘I am the President of Iraq and I am ready to negotiate.’ He was swiftly transferred to American military custody.
Saddam’s arrest put an end to the last contingent mystery of the war. A greater mystery remained, attaching not to the war’s events but to its fundamental character. How had it been possible to fight a war which was not, by any conventional measure, really a war at all? All the components of a war had been in place, two large armies, huge quantities of military equipment and, that most essential element of modern hostilities, an enormous press corps, equipped and alert to report, film or broadcast its slightest incident. Beyond the battleground, moreover, the world had been transfixed by a war mood. Governments had been thrown at loggerheads over the war’s rights and wrongs, the workings of the great international organizations had been monopolized by debate over the war, populations had marched against the war, the world’s religious leaders had uttered the direst warnings about the war’s outcome, the international media had written and spoken about little else but war for weeks before, during and afterwards. Yet, when war engulfed their country, the people who ought to have been most affected by it, the population of Iraq itself, seemed scarcely to give it their attention. American cheerleaders had predicted that the invading army would be overwhelmed by the gratitude of the liberated once it appeared on Iraqi territory. Opponents of the war, particularly in the media, puzzled at first by the lack of opposition the invaders encountered, consoled themselves with a prediction of their own: that when the American army reached Baghdad, it would be resisted block by block, street by street. There would be a Stalingrad-on-Tigris and the West would regret that it had ever flouted high-minded opinion by mounting such an expedition.
In the event, the invaders found the population largely absent from the scene of action. There were no crowds, either welcoming or hostile. There were scarcely any people to be seen at all. In the countryside the mud hut dwellings of the cultivators displayed at best a scrap of white flag, flapping from a stick, as a sign the occupants recognized that a war was in progress. Often they gave no sign at all. Herders and ploughmen wended their heedless way about the landscape. Mothers shooed their children to shelter at the sight of military vehicles. Camel drivers stood to gaze. Otherwise the dusty countryside lay empty under a pall of apparent indifference at the world crisis that had come to visit Iraq.
Civilian unwillingness to engage with the war was matched, and more than matched, by that of the rank and file of the Iraqi army. Saddam commanded some 400,000 men in uniform, 60,000 of them in his loyalist Republican Guard. Few were well trained and most of their military equipment, once of the Soviet first-line, was now antiquated. The coalition high command nevertheless expected them to fight. Its soldiers, particularly the younger men who had never been in battles, were spoiling to meet the challenge. They were to be largely disappointed. Here and there they found spots of resistance, Iraqi infantrymen who manned their positions, tank crews who exchanged fire. In most cases as the invaders advanced to places wher...
