Book Review by Daniel Moran of The Iraq War: Strategy, Tactics, and Military Lessons by Anthony H. Cordesman, and The Iraq War: A Military History by Williamson Murray and Major General Robert H. Scales

Abstract

The United States and its allies went to war against Iraq in 2003, as Williamson Murray and Robert Scales reasonably propose, “to make an example out of Saddam’s regime, for better or worse” (p. 44). Exactly what the war exemplified, and whether the results are better or worse than might have been achieved by other means, are, to say the least, matters of continuing dispute. In the meantime, we might as well start getting the facts straight, at least as far as military operations are concerned. The two books above are both contributions to that necessary work. They are exercises in bridge-building, reaching forward from wartime journalism and postwar postmortems to the more mature scholarship of the future. Given the time pressure under which they were prepared, they are far better than anyone would have had reason to expect.