The Iraq War

Also by John Keegan

Intelligence in War
The First World War
The Face of Battle
The Nature of War
(with Joseph Darracott)
World Armies
Who’s Who in Military History
(with Andrew Wheatcroft)
Six Armies in Normandy
Soldiers
(with Richard Holmes)
The Mask of Command
The Price of Admirality
The Second World War
A History of Warfare
Fields of Battle
The Battle for History
War and Our World: The Reith Lectures 1998
An Illustrated History of the First World War
Churchill: A Life

First section

Second section

I should like to thank my colleagues at
The Daily Telegraph
with whom I covered the Iraq War on a daily basis during March and April 2003, particularly Charles Moore, then the Editor, Michael Smith, the Defence Correspondent, Alec Russell, the Foreign Editor, Con Coughlin and Kate Baden, my secretary. I was encouraged to undertake this book by my editor at Hutchinson, Anthony Whittome. I was at first unwilling to do so because of the difficulties I foresaw but he predicted that they would dissolve. He was right and I am glad that he persuaded me to take up what has proved to be an unusually interesting commission.

I am also grateful to Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defense, whom I twice interviewed in his office at the Pentagon. He also made it possible for me to interview General Tommy Franks, CENTCOM Commander, immediately after the war was over. I am extremely grateful to General Franks for his openness. I also received valuable help from Colonel Christopher Vernon, Colonel Michael Dewar and Lt-Colonel Richard Hoare, all of the British army.

I should also like to thank my American editor, Ashbel Green at Knopf, my literary agent, Anthony Sheil and my irreplaceable assistant, Lindsey Wood. Without her ability to meet very tight deadlines the book could not have been produced.

Finally, my love and thanks to my children, Lucy, Tom, Rose and Matthew, and to my darling wife, Susanne.

Kilmington Manor,
Wiltshire,
15 March 2004

S
ome wars begin badly. Some end badly. The Iraq War of 2003 was exceptional in both beginning well for the Anglo-American force that waged it and ending victoriously. The credit properly belonged in both cases to the American part of the coalition. It was the Americans who provided the majority of strength on the ground and overwhelmingly the majority in the air and at sea. The British contribution was important and warmly welcomed by the Americans but it was that of an esteemed junior partner.

The war was not only successful but peremptorily short, lasting only twenty-one days, from 20 March to 9 April. Campaigns so brief are rare, a lightning campaign so complete in its results almost unprecedented. For comparisons one has to reach back to the ‘cabinet wars’ of the nineteenth century, Prussia’s victory over Austria in six weeks in 1866 or over the French field army in less than a month in 1870. Walkovers, as by the Germans in the Balkans in 1941, do not count. The Iraqis had fielded a sizeable army and had fought, after a fashion. Their resistance had simply been without discernible effect. The Americans came, saw, conquered. How?

While reporting the war in
The Daily Telegraph
I frequently found myself writing that its events were ‘mysterious’. It was a strange word for a military analyst to use in what should have been objective comment. Even in retrospect, however, I see no reason to look for another. The war was mysterious in almost
every aspect. Mystery shrouded the
casus belli
, the justification for going to war. The war was launched because Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq, refused to co-operate with United Nations inspectors in their search for his forbidden weapons of mass destruction. Yet even after his defeat laid the whole territory of Iraq open to search, such weapons eluded discovery. Mystery surrounded the progress of operations. Iraq fielded an army of nearly 400,000 soldiers, equipped with thousands of tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery pieces. Against the advance of an invading force only half its size, the Iraqi army faded away. It did not fight at the frontier, it did not fight at the obvious geographical obstacles, it scarcely fought in the cities, it did not mount a last-ditch defence of the capital, where much of the world media predicted that Saddam would stage his Stalingrad.

The régime, so bombastic in speech before and during the conflict, mysteriously failed to take elementary defensive precautions. In a country of great rivers, the Euphrates and Tigris pre-eminently but also their tributaries, it failed to destroy the bridges, or even in many cases to prepare them for demolition. While the regular army and the vaunted Republican Guard apparently demobilized themselves, the soldiers disappearing to their homes at the appearance of the invaders, their place was taken by mysterious ‘fighters’ of the skimpiest military training, devotees of the ruling Ba’athist party or foreign Islamicists with an urge to die. Perhaps most mysteriously of all, much of the population of Iraq, the ordinary town dwellers and country people, exhibited a complete indifference to the war going on around them, carrying on their everyday lives apparently oblivious of its dangers. To the bewilderment and fury of the coalition soldiers, traffic often travelled as normal, civilian cars and trucks proceeding headlong into the middle of firefights and stopping only if shot at, by young soldiers terrified that the driver might be a suicide bomber.

Mystery ultimately enfolded the fall of the régime. Following the capture and occupation of Baghdad on 9–10 April, no trace of the government could be found. Not only was there no large
number of prisoners of war, the usual index of victory, there were equally no captured generals or staff officers nor, most puzzlingly of all, politicians treating for peace. The Ba’ath leaders and their party officials had disappeared, just as the army and the Republican Guard had disappeared. The disappearance of the soldiers was easily explained. They had taken off their uniforms and become civilians again. The disappearance of the leaders was baffling. It was understandable that, fearing retribution for the crimes of the régime, summarily at the hands of the population, judicially by process of the conquerors, the principal perpetrators and their associates should seek to make their escape; but where had they gone? The American high command distributed packs of cards, each bearing the photographic image of a wanted man. The distribution yielded results. The owlish Tariq Aziz, Deputy Prime Minister, was arrested. So were a number of other important if less prominent Saddam apparatchiks. On 22 July 2003 Saddam Hussein’s sons Qusay and Uday, both steeped in the brutality against political opponents which was their father’s trademark, were betrayed, by the inducement of a $15 million reward, and killed during a gun battle in the northern city of Mosul. Kurdistan might have been thought an ill-chosen hiding place for the dictator’s sons. One of the most extreme Islamicist terror organizations, Ansar al-Islam, had however set up what amounted to a ‘liberated zone’ in Kurdistan, so perhaps encouraging the two thugs – whom Saddam had hardened to their inheritance by sending them to witness torture and executions – to seek refuge there.