The long and blinding road in Iraq wars - Entertainment, Books - Air Force Times

The long and blinding road in Iraq wars

This could be a textbook for Iraq 101, the survey course of U.S. involvement in Iraq from Operation Desert Storm to Iraqi Freedom.

Caveat: The first part is especially scholarly — Desert Storm takes longer to read than to win. But ...

History books are meant to record and review, not necessarily to regale. By the end, the author commendably and comprehensively conveys the context of a conflict that continues.

John R. Ballard, a retired Marine and OIF veteran at the National Defense University, chooses “to view the strife of over two decades as a single prolonged conflict.”

The singular personification of the tension is Saddam Hussein — the thorn in the Rose Garden for at least three U.S. presidents.

The start of the current war in 2003 “demonstrated that the U.S. and Iraq still did not understand each other and did not communicate well either.”

Ballard’s focus is the U.S., but he offers welcome sections about the Iraqi view.

The book has an objective tone despite occasional sly jabs in titles such as “The Lost Year of the Coalition Provisional Authority” and “The Two Great Blunders.”

If a student were highlighting possible classroom discussion points, the pen might mark these:

• Familiar territory. After World War I, a British commander tells Iraqi locals that “our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.” Sheiks were given authority in order “to minimize the number of British local administrators.”

• The long haul. “Americans are almost genetically opposed to prolonged military operations. Although the U.S. conducted a series of operations against the native Indians in the late 1870s and 1880s, a similar campaign in the Philippines from 1899 to 1913, and another in Haiti from 1915 through 1934, these actions were never identified as campaigns and never publicized thoroughly enough to attract popular scrutiny.”

• A Medal of Honor recipient. “It was during one of these Iraqi attacks on the 2nd Battalion, 7th Infantry Regiment that Staff Sergeant Paul Smith won the first Medal of Honor of the war.”

There is no mention that the honor was posthumous. The narrative offers few U.S. death counts — a strange omission in a chronicle of history.

• The failure of economic sanctions. “Instead of being greeted as liberators by a happy population, and being able to quickly turn the country back to Iraqi control, coalition forces would be faced in 2003 with a country whose people were weakened in all the ways that mattered most — physically, economically, morally, spiritually.”