Review The Iraq War

 Review Keegan, John, The Iraq War, Vintage Books, 2005

 

John Keegan is a noted British military historian. He made a notable achievement with his The Iraq War because it gets progressively worse the further you read into it.

 

The problems with Keegan’s book are many. First off for a book that is supposed to be about the 2003 invasion of Iraq he only spends four pages explaining America’s motivation. Like many early books on the Iraq War he solely focuses upon the neoconservative movement in the U.S. that talked about using military force to deal with America’s enemies and spreading democracy. The author writes that after 9/11 President Bush followed a neoconservative path. That’s all Keegan has to say about the matter. Neoconservatives did play a role in overthrowing Saddam but there were plenty of other personalities and reasons involved. Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who were some of the leading voices for war were not neoconservatives. The neoconservatives were all Republicans but there were also liberal Democrats who supported regime change in Iraq. The book has nothing to say about this and completely fails to provide any kind of comprehensive discussion of why the U.S. removed Saddam Hussein from power.

 

Second the author consistently states his dislike and lack of comprehension about Islam. He writes that “The modern Muslim mind is alien both to Christian and Enlightenment ways of thinking.” He says that Muslims hate Western civilization based upon long historical grievances. He then goes back to the Muslim conquest of Spain and the Balkans. Supposedly Muslims are opposed to the West because they are still mad that they lost Spain in the 15^th Century. He adds that the religion cut itself off from change and reflection in the 14^th Century only to note that in the 1950s a jailed Muslim Brotherhood member Sayid Qutb in Egypt came up with a new concept of militant Islam that helped inspire a new Islamist movement in the world. Somehow Islam can’t change but it did. His basic argument is that no Westerner can understand Muslims because they are all stuck in ancient history and reject the modern world. Unfortunately there were many others who voiced these same kind of ideas after 9/11. They usually talked about a clash of civilizations between the West and East.

 

Third Keegan constantly contradicts himself. In one section he claims that autocracy in the Middle East is due to Islam which is illiberal and based upon the concept of a caliphate. Then he says Saddam’s rule actually had its roots in Nazism and Joseph Stalin. Again, he argues that Muslims are all living in the past but then they are influenced by modern Western ideas.

 

A fourth issue with The Iraq War is its tendency to go off on tangents over and over again. In a chapter on Saddam’s rule it starts by discussing the concept of power in the Middle East since ancient times. Again this fits into Keegan’s idea that the region is largely unchanged since at least the Ottoman Empire. It’s a completely useless discussion when more time could’ve been spent actually covering Saddam who the author admits was partially inspired by modern Western dictatorships.

 

Finally, Keegan was a staunch supporter of the war. He said that the Iraq invasion was an example of how the world should be secured and said that it was better off without Saddam. He derided media outlets that criticized the conflict and the countries that opposed it. For example he called French President Chirac a blowhard who was only interested in doing business with Iraq and said German Chancellor Schroeder was anti-American.

 

The Iraq War is a lesson on the prejudices which were voiced by many in the West after 9/11. Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein and Muslims in general were considered a dangerous and backwards foreign Other. Force like the Iraq invasion was the way to deal with them. Anyone that opposed the war not only didn’t have a realistic view of the world but at their heart were anti-American and would oppose anything Washington did. Overall this makes Keegan’s book a maddening read. It’s made worse by the fact that he couldn’t even stay on track with his own arguments constantly making deep dives into history and background information that usually had little to do with the subject at hand.

 

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