By Kenneth M. Pollack
Published: November 2, 2003
THE IRAQ WAR
A Military History.
By Williamson Murray
and Robert H. Scales Jr.
Illustrated. 312 pp. Cambridge, Mass.:
The Belknap Press/
Harvard University Press. $25.95.
Williamson Murray and Robert H. Scales Jr. are serious military historians. For this reason, their quick history of Operation Iraqi Freedom is likely to prove better than many others being written at this moment. Although ''The Iraq War: A Military History'' is narrow in its scope and not without flaws, it is useful and insightful and should continue to merit reading even after more extensive studies are published.
Murray is probably one of the dozen finest military historians writing in English today. His books ''The Luftwaffe, 1933-1945'' and ''The Change in the European Balance of Power, 1938-1939'' remain landmark works. His pathbreaking analyses of military effectiveness with Allan Millett were a major contribution to American strategic studies during the cold war. He was also part of the United States Air Force's Gulf War Air Power Survey, which analyzed the air war in America's first war with Saddam Hussein. Scales is a retired major general and the former commandant of the Army War College. He is also the author of several books, including ''Certain Victory,'' the Army's account of its role in Operation Desert Storm.
Be forewarned: the subtitle describes the book very accurately. It is a military history. Readers looking to understand better the prewar diplomacy, Washington's decision to go to war, planning for postwar reconstruction, the news media's role, weapons of mass destruction or nation building in the Middle East should look elsewhere. These are not Murray and Scales's subjects. Moreover, the book is not without its problems. Perhaps because it is a purely military history, the first chapter of the book -- the political ''setup'' chapter -- is by far the weakest. Murray and Scales do not have much to add regarding the context or outbreak of the war. Their treatment of the war on terrorism is uncritical, while their cursory overview of Iraq is pretty bad.
Indeed, Murray and Scales are not Middle East experts, and at times it shows. Many of their comments about Iraq, Iraqis, Iraqi history and the Iraqi armed forces are superficial, simplistic, stereotyped or just incorrect. Their descriptions of Baathist ideology and the role of Baathism in Iraqi society strike many wrong notes. Perhaps because of the speed with which they produced this book, Murray and Scales also have very little to say about the Iraqi side. ''The Iraq War'' is essentially just the American story of the war, and the Iraqis themselves appear in it fleetingly.
But because the book is so focused on the military story, and on the American side at that, these problems actually do not get in the way of the authors' principal goal, and their insights into this specific topic are the book's great strength.
First, ''The Iraq War'' is an excellent overview of the American military campaign itself. Operation Iraqi Freedom was an extremely complicated and fast-moving campaign -- one that did not lend itself to being understood in bite-size pieces, as most Americans experienced it from television news reports. For this reason, while the embedded journalists provided a wealth of tactical color that helped the average American understand certain aspects of the war, they did little to help the viewer comprehend the operational maneuvering of American forces and the rationale behind those actions.
Murray and Scales make sense of the various events of the war and put them in their proper context -- spatially, chronologically and thematically. In a way that the disconnected reports of the embedded journalists could not, they are able to convey just how remarkable this military campaign was -- and why.
The book generally paints with broad brushstrokes, concentrating on the operational maneuvering of the American forces. This works well, allowing the authors to show how all the strands of the war were woven together to create the overall campaign plan. Murray and Scales deftly illustrate how the Army and Marine thrusts complemented each other, how the wide-ranging Special Forces operations supported the main advances, how the air campaign meshed with the ground operations, how the northern and southern fronts interacted and how the fighting at the forefront was influenced by the battles along the long lines of communication back to Kuwait. In particular, their accounts of the operations in northern Iraq and the American maneuvering to break through the Republican Guard lines south of Baghdad are superb.
Yet Murray and Scales also have a knack for integrating tactical vignettes into their operational narrative that adds greatly to the work. Their description of the savage firefights in and around Baghdad will quite likely force many readers to rethink their impressions of the ease of the American victory. Details like these give the reader a bit of the taste and smell of the fighting. More important, Murray and Scales use them adroitly to highlight factors that shaped the thinking of American military commanders at key stages and to point out critical lessons about the conduct of modern war.