Bird’s eye on Baghdad

THE IRAQ WAR

John Keegan

Knopf, $24.95, 254 pages, illus.

John Keegan’s latest book, “The Iraq War,” might have been better titled “A Primer on Iraq.” The first half of the book is a brief history of that nation, going back to the dawn of civilization and culminating in events leading up to the military confrontation with an American-led coalition in March 2003. This alone makes the book worth its price.

Although he doesn’t claim to cover events beyond the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, after 21 days of fighting, Mr. Keegan provides a basis for understanding the embers of the insurgent conflagration that became the second part of the war and continues to burn today.

For example, few Americans know that Iraq’s claim to Kuwait as its 19th province is not merely an affectation of a power-mad Saddam Hussein, but a belief held by the majority of Iraqis. Mr. Keegan also goes on to outline the roots of the Kurdish problem; his explanation of how deep those roots are should sound a cautionary note for Iraqi and American planners, who are prone to take Kurdish cooperation for granted.

Perhaps the part of this book that could have been useful to former U.S. Special Envoy L. Paul Bremer and planners at the Coalition Provisional Authority, had it been published at an earlier date, deals with the Ba’ath Party leadership of the government before it was hijacked by Saddam.

Contrary to popular American myth, the Ba’ath Party was one of the most popular institutions in the country in the 1960s and early 1970s. It was largely responsible for turning Iraq from a dusty former Turkish backwater into one of the bright spots in the Middle East, prior to Saddam’s ascension and his bloody repressions and wars.

The Ba’athists built highways, a first-class power grid and a superb education system. Many older Iraqis I know still proudly carry their pre-Saddam Ba’ath Party cards. In retrospect, treating the whole Ba’ath movement as we treated the Nazis in Germany was a failure of cultural intelligence.

Chapters in “The Iraq War” dealing with the actual fighting are concise and well-written. (The maps are broad-brushed but comprehensible.) Mr. Keegan credits the Americans with superb operational planning and logistical execution. In this he differs from many retired U.S. military officers, who felt that logistics was a shoestring operation.

The author gives his beloved British army justifiable credit for their usual dauntless professionalism. He believes that the decision to give them the Basra sector emphasized their urban strengths and played down their weaknesses in long-term logistics, and he reminds readers that the Iranians tried to take Basra with a much larger force for nearly a decade. To this day, the British sector remains the best-managed postwar part of Arab Iraq.

Mr. Keegan also does a good job explaining this elusive, but prominent, thing called military transformation. He describes how improved sensor capability and precision weapons allowed American planners to pursue a campaign with a much smaller force, and over far greater distances, than was possible in the first Gulf War.

The story of why it might take a larger force to occupy a country than to conquer it in the first place is probably best left to his next book.

“The Iraq War” is not without faults. It leaves units out of the order-of-battle appendix at the end, most notably the Marine Corps 3rd Light Armored Infantry Battalion, which played a major role in the capture of Tikrit and in rescuing American prisoners of war. However, the overall approach is clear and free of inessential clutter.

Mr. Keegan is a noted and prolific military historian with a number of fine books to his credit, most notably “The Face of Battle,” which ranks with the works of S.L.A. Marshall as one the finest studies of soldiers in combat written in modern times. Other of his books include “The Price of Admiralty” and “The Mask of Command,” along with several excellent volumes on World War II.

Readers desiring a more detailed operational account will have to wait for a book currently being researched by Michael Gordon and Gen. Bernard Trainor, authors of the best book on operational art in the first Gulf War, “The Generals’ War.”

Still, Mr. Keegan gives us a superb strategic overview of the second Iraq conflict in this slim but concise account. There will undoubtedly be a second volume because much has happened in the interim since this book went to press; Mr. Keegan has laid solid groundwork for his next project.

Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps officer who lectures on the Revolution in Military Affairs at George Washington University.