The Iraq War

The Iraq War John Keegan Date: 25 May, 2004   —   $16.97   —   Book product page Rating:

I have thoroughly enjoyed all of John Keegan’s previous books. Which is what makes this one such a disappointment.

John Keegan’s biggest problem is one of scale. He tells the tale of the Iraq war on a grand scale. He basically says, the US 3rd Infantry Division and the 1st Marine Division advanced up the Euphrates river valley to capture Baghdad while the British 1st Armoured Division took Basra. On that scale, there really isn’t much more to say, and consequently, Keegan only devotes the last third of the book to the actual war.

I would have preferred a more in depth treatment of smaller units and their experiences. Unfortunately, the Iraq operation is written about on the same grand scale as the author’s books about World Wars One and Two.

The second problem is that John Keegan is too close to the subject matter. He is a big supporter of the invasion and never misses a chance to gloss over controversial aspects or take a poke at the “liberal” media and all who criticized the war. This book is far from a dispassionate description of a military operation, and sometimes reads like an op-ed piece.

Keegan slaps the label “Olympian” on anyone and any institution that opposed or voiced concerns about the legitimacy of the Iraq invasion. Olympians, he says, are supranationalists who believe states can be controlled through supranational beaurocracies and supranational legal systems without ever resorting to force. The book is littered with comments like, “…they were, in most cases unwittingly, adherents of the Olympian outlook…”

He also takes every opportunity to slam “anti-American elements in the Western Media” and cites Judith Miller of the New York Times as a media hero for her dogged reporting of the danger of Saddam’s WMD - which is odd, because she was recently discredited for using incorrect and unchecked information in NYT articles promoting the war. I’m sure that happened before the book went to press, but there’s no mention of it.

There are some good points. The first two thirds of the book present a concise history of Iraq from prehistoric times to the present, and include the rise of Saddam Hussein, the Iran-Iraq war, and the first Gulf War. Keegan makes a great case for ousting Saddam for humanitarian and regional stability reasons (too bad President Bush didn’t do the same), but completely downplays the lack of evidence – even before the war – that Iraq had WMD.

So this is a fairly good, short history of Iraq and Saddam Hussein, but if you’re interested in a military history of the war, this one isn’t very good.