THE IRAQ WAR

John Keegan

NF/VG--. Inch-long tear to upper left corner of jacket (see photo). Jacket in mylar protector. (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004). First American Edition. Appendices, bibliography, index, 254 pp.

Kristin Henderson is married to a Navy chaplain who has served with the Marines in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her portraits of military spouses whose loved ones go to war are both deeply engaging and hard-won. The author's insider experience allows her to uncover hidden and often difficult aspects of military culture on and off the vast bases that define many regions of America.

The 2003 Iraq war remains among the most mysterious armed conflicts of modernity. In The Iraq War, John Keegan offers a sharp and lucid appraisal of the military campaign, explaining just how the coalition forces defeated an Iraqi army twice its size and addressing such questions as whether Saddam Hussein ever possessed weapons of mass destruction and how it is possible to fight a war that is not, by any conventional measure, a war at all. ~~~~ Drawing on exclusive interviews with Donald Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, Keegan retraces the steps that led to the showdown in Iraq, from the highlights of Hussein’s murderous rule to the diplomatic crossfire that preceded the invasion. His account of the combat in the desert is unparalleled in its grasp of strategy and tactics. The result is an urgently needed and up-to-date book that adds immeasurably to our understanding of those twenty-one days of war and their long, uncertain aftermath.

From The Washington Post: 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.

From Foreign Affairs: Keegan -- not so much a journalist as a military historian who happens to work for a newspaper -- has written an account of the Iraq war that benefits from a long historical prologue (which includes discussion of the post-World War I British attempt to pacify Iraq) and his skill at capturing the dynamics of a military campaign. Keegan, however, must now wish that he had waited to complete the book, as events have conspired to put the war, which he describes in a positive and even partisan tone, in a more dismal light. The postwar scene gets cursory treatment, under the heading of "The Aftermath," and this is the story now waiting to be told. More than the campaign itself, it is the diplomatic isolation during the build-up and the incompetence and trauma of the occupation that may define a turning point in U.S. foreign policy-and the end of the Vulcans' rise.

~~~ Hardcover currently OUT OF PRINT.

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