Review David Siddhartha Patel, Order Out Of Chaos, Islam, Information, And The Rise And Fall Of Social Orders In Iraq, Cornell University, 2022

  

There has been some very original work done by Iraq scholars recently and David Sidhartha Patel's Order Out Of Chaos, Islam, Information, And The Rise And Fall Of Social Order In Iraq can be counted as one of them. Patel spent time in Basra City in 2003-04 and 2011 doing research and interviews with locals. He wanted to explain how social order was created in Iraq immediately after the invasion when the government collapsed and the Coalition was barely present. He argues that mosques run by Ayatollah Sistani and Moqtada al-Sadr were able to form community out of their followers where one had not existed before.

Review Dunya Mikhail, The Beekeeper of Sinjar, Serpent’s Tail, 2018

  

The Beekeeper of Sinjar is full of heartbreaking stories of mostly Yazidis who were victims of the Islamic State takeover of northern Iraq in 2014. Author Dunya Mikhail befriended a Yazidi man named Abdullah who was helping women escape from the militants. He told her of some of the people he assisted. Many of the tales are similar but they need to be told as the community faced genocide during the war.

Review Weam Namou, Iraqi Americans Witnessing A Genocide, Hermiz Publishing, 2015

  

Iraqi Americans Witnessing A Genocide by Weam Namou is an attempt to record the author’s response to what happened in Iraq after 2003 as well as how the Iraqi Christian community in Michigan reacted to the war with the Islamic State in 2014. It reads like a journal of Namou’s thoughts on her former motherland jumping from topic to topic.

Review Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, A Study of Iraq’s Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of its Communists, Ba’thists and Free Officers, SAQI Books

  

Hanna Batatu’s The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movement of Iraq, A Study of Iraq’s Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of its Communists, Ba’thists and Free Officers is an all-time classic in Iraqi history. It is one of the early attempts to apply modern social science to the country. Batatu had extensive access to British, Iraqi government, Communist and Baathist papers along with interviews. Not only that it was published in English so it was accessible in the West. His main thesis was that the entrance of European capitalism into Iraq forever changed the economy and politics of the country and shaped the major events up the 1970s when his work ends.

Review Kathleen Bailey, The UN Inspections in Iraq, Lessons for On-Site Verification, Westview Press, 1995

  

Kathleen Baily wrote The UN Inspections in Iraq, Lessons for On-Site Verification in the midst of the United Nations weapons inspections in Iraq in the 1990s. Her goal was to review what the U.N. had found, how Iraq responded and provided recommendations for future inspections. That means not all parts of the book are of interest to the average reader but it does cover a wealth of information about what transpired in Iraq.

Review Edited by Lisa Blaydes and Samuel Helfont, Ba’thist Iraq Through Archives, Reflections, Explorations and Opportunities, Stanford University Press, 2026

  

Ba’thist Iraq Through Archives, Reflections, Explorations and Opportunities was the result of a 2023 conference at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University in California where academics and researchers met to discuss the Baathist archives that were captured after the Gulf War and 2003 invasion. Like most anthologies the chapters are a bit varied but there are some very interesting findings given the talent that was assembled.

Review Charles River Editors, The Mandate for Mesopotamia: The History and Legacy of British Occupation and Iraq’s Independence after World War I, Charles Rivers Editors, 2021

  

The Mandate for Mesopotamia is a short overview of British rule and influence in Iraq after World War I. It covers European imperialism in the Middle East before the Great War up to the 1941 Anglo-Iraq War. The history is generally well done but it missed the opportunity to draw parallels between the British and American occupations of Iraq at the end.

Review Tom Cooper, Sirous Ebrahimi, & E.R. Hooton, Iran-Iraq Naval War, Volume 2: Convoy Battles, 1981-1984, Helion & Company, 2024

  

Tom Cooper has collaborated on a large number of books about the militaries of the Middle East. This time he worked with Sirous Ebrahimi and E.R. Hooton to produce Iran-Iraq Naval War, Volume 2: Convoy Battles, 1981-1984. The book provides a wealth of detail for a part of the conflict which is barely covered but that might be for a good reason.

Review Arbella Bet-Shlimon, City of Black Gold, Oil, Ethnicity, and the making of Modern Kirkuk, Stanford University Press, 2019

  

Arbella Bet-Shlimon can be considered one of the new Iraq researchers who attempted to break free of the conventional wisdom that shaped much of the discourse about the country after 2003. Her City of Black Gold, Oil, Ethnicity, and the making of Modern Kirkuk takes a look at the political and economic development of the city from Ottoman times to the present. Rather than seeing the city as always being divided by competing ethnicities the book creates a history where Kirkuk was shaped by Turkey, England, Iraq, oil and where ethnicity changed over time.

Review Edmund Ghareeb, The Kurdish Question In Iraq, Syracuse University Press, 1981

  

Edmund Ghareeb’s The Kurdish Question In Iraq is a bit of an oddity. On the one hand it takes much of what the Baath government said about Arab nationalism and the Kurdish issue in the 1960s and 70s at face value. On the other hand it gives a very good criticism of Mulla Mustafa Barzani and his struggle against the Iraqi government. His thesis is that Barzani’s miscalculations and autocracy led to his downfall.

Review John Glubb, Arabian Adventures, Ten Years of Joyful Service, Cassell, 1978

  

John Glubb was an English soldier and official in Iraq during the British Mandate. He was proud to serve the empire believing that it developed what he saw as primitive societies. At the same time he had some issues with the way that the Mandate was run. Most of his Arabian Adventure, Ten Years of Joyful Service is his impressions of Iraq’s tribal society which he believed was disappearing.

Review Orit Bashkin, Impossible Exodus, Iraqi Jews In Israel, Stanford University Press, 2017

  

In 2015 an Israeli was looking for an Arab to kill in revenge for the deaths of Jews. He stabbed an Iraqi Jew because he looked like an Arab. Even after the Iraqi yelled that he was Jewish the man continued his attack. Luckily the Iraqi was able to run away. This is a metaphor for author Orit Bashkin on how Iraqis were treated in Israel. Even though they were Jewish they were treated as an Other because they came from an Arab country.

Review Nikolas Gardner, The Siege of Kut-al-Amara, At War In Mesopotamia 1915-1916, Indiana University of Press, 2014

  

The British defeat at Kut during the Mesopotamia campaign was England’s second worse during World War I. Around 12,000 troops were taken prisoner almost half of which died in captivity. Nikolas Gardner in The Siege of Kut-al-Amara, At War In Mesopotamia 1915-1916 attempts to challenge the conventional wisdom about Kut. He makes a convincing argument that the commander General Sir Charles Townshend was responsible for the surrender.

Review Khidhir Hamza, Saddam’s Bombmaker, The Terrifying Inside Story Of The Iraqi Nuclear And Biological Weapons Agenda, Scribner, 2000

  

Before the 2003 invasion Khidhir Hamza was one of the leading Iraqis in America warning of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and advocating for war. He regularly appeared in the media. In 2001 he told PBS’s Frontline that Iraq only needed a nuclear core to build an atomic bomb. In 2002 he gave a presentation to the Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. He told the latter that Iraq had enough uranium to build three bombs by 2005 if it was enriched. At the end of that year his claims were used in a speech by President George Bush as part of the public relations campaign to win support for the invasion. His story was first published in 2000 in Saddam’s Bombmaker, The Terrifying Inside Story Of The Iraqi Nuclear And Biological Weapons Agenda. He turned out to be a fraud.

Review George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm, My Years at the CIA, Harper Collins, 2007

  

George Tenet was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency under Presidents Clinton and Bush. He eventually resigned because of the controversy over Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. His book At The Center of the Storm is very interesting because it shows that he was very sensitive about his time at the Agency with several chapters responding to criticisms of his tenure.

Review Hourly History, The Iraq War, A History from Beginning to End, 2023

  

Looking at The Iraq War, A History from Beginning to End one would think it was for children’s because it is only about half the size of a regular book. That would be a mistake. While it is printed on small paper and is very short at less than 100 pages it turns out to be a thorough review of the Iraq War from the Clinton to the Biden administrations with some good analysis.

Review Oles Smolansky with Bettie Smolansky, The USSR And Iraq, The Soviet Quest For Influence, Duke University Press, 1991

  

Until the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 Moscow was Iraq’s biggest supporter. Those ties were developed under the Bakr government and the Soviet Union in the late-1960s. Oles and Bettie Smolanky’s The USSR And Iraq, The Soviet Quest For Influence studies this relationship from the 1950s to the end of the Iran-Iraq War. They refute the common Cold War belief that the Soviets created clientist states like Iraq. Instead the two had common interests that created an alliance between them. The Smolankys argue that Baghdad was able to follow its own national interests without threatening that relationship.

Review Edited by Paul Cornish, The Conflict In Iraq, 2003, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004

  

The Conflict In Iraq is an anthology with chapters by various authors connected to the Center for Defense Studies at King’s College London. Like any collection some of the chapters are quite good and others are not. The fact that the book was put together very early in the U.S. occupation of Iraq also makes some of the readings outdated. Still there are some important insights provided such as comparisons between the British and Americans times in Iraq, the war planning, and United Nations weapons inspections.

Review Saleem Al-Khalil, The Race Toward Najaf, Abdul Majid Al-Khoie Amidst Americans, Sistani, and Khamenei, Saleem Al-Khalil, 2024

  

Saleem Al-Khalil’s The Race Toward Najaf is about Sayid Abdul Majid al-Khoie’s murder in Najaf in 2003 shortly after the U.S. invasion by Muqtada al-Sadr. It then goes over what might’ve happened if Khoei had lived. The coverage of his death is quite good. The second part however which attempts to blame Iran for everything has huge holes in it.

Review Anthony Cordesman, and Ahmed Hashim, Iraq Sanctions and Beyond, Westview Press, 1997

  

Anthony Cordesman has been one of the longest tenured Iraq analysts in the United Sates. His Iraq Sanctions and Beyond with Ahmed Hashim is a perfect example of his thorough and detailed work. Written at the end of the 1990s it attempted to break down the major political, economic and military aspects of Iraq as a backgrounder to American policy makers. The two authors represented the conventional wisdom during this period that Saddam Hussein remained a threat to the Middle East but that the policy of containment and especially sanctions was faltering requiring adjustments.