Review Samuel Helfont, The Iraq Wars, A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2025

  

Samuel Helfont released his third book on Iraq entitled The Iraq Wars, A Very Short Introduction. It is a brief review of U.S.-Iraq relations from the 1990s to the 2014 war versus the Islamic State. He provides some new and interesting insights on how Iraq became a focus of American foreign policy.

 

One of Helfont’s first observations was how Iraq led the U.S. to abandon the New World Order that President Bush thought the Gulf War was creating. The president thought Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait was a challenge to a new global system after the Cold War that would be based upon international law and cooperation under American leadership. That was why the U.S. went to the United Nations and got several resolutions against Iraq and created a large coalition against Saddam. After the Gulf War however the U.S. stretched those resolutions to include all kinds of things such as two no fly zones over northern and southern Iraq. Eventually the second Bush ignored the United Nations to invade Iraq in 2003 and went with a symbolic Coalition of the Willing. In the process the U.S. alienated allies such as France and Germany and rivals like Russia and China which had largely stood with America against Iraq before. The author points out that everything the Iraq conflict was supposed to create Washington would abandon.

 

Another astute point was about how the 2003 invasion came about. Helfont wrote that President Bush began a policy of coercive diplomacy talking about deposing Saddam and deploying forces to the Middle East hoping that it would change Iraq’s stance. Bush never changed course which meant there was going to be war. Ironically the U.S. never convinced Saddam there was going to be war. He thought if there was a conflict it would just be like the Gulf War with bombing and fighting in the south. The only people that changed their minds about Iraq was the American population.

 

The Iraq Wars is only about 150 pages of text and yet it packs a big punch. It adds a depth of analysis to the decades long conflict between the United States and Iraq making it a worthwhile read.

 

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