The Iraq War

by John Keegan

  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

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2004 by John Keegan

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Originally published in Great Britain by Hutchinson, the Random Group Limited, London.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Maps by Reginald Piggott

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Keegan, John, [date]

  The Iraq war / by John Keegan.—1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-40004-344-6

  1. Iraq War, 2003. I. Title.

  DS79.76.K44 2004

  956.7044′3—dc2 2004006895

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Illustrations

  Maps

  Acknowledgments

  1. A Mysterious War

  2. Iraq Before Saddam

  3. Saddam Hussein

  4. Saddam’s Wars

  5. The Crisis of 2002–03

  6. The American War

  7. The British War

  8. The Fall of Baghdad

  9. The War’s Aftermath

  Appendices

  1. Coalition Order of Battle

  2. Reviewing the Iraq War with General Franks, 1 July 2003

  Bibliography

  A Note About the Author

  Illustrations

  First section

  Colin Powell with Jack Straw (Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)

  General Tommy Franks (Reuters/Tim Aubry)

  Iraqi Information Minister Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf (Reuters/Faleh heiber)

  Central Command personnel in the Joint Operations Centre, Qatar (AP Photo/Wally Santana)

  Lieutenant-General John McKiernan (Defence Picture Library)

  USAF B-1 bomber (Defence Picture Library)

  Captain Tom Bryant of V Corps walks ahead of his Humvee during a fierce sandstorm (Defence Picture Library)

  Cobra helicopter (US Marines) (Defence Picture Library)

  US Army medics of the 2nd Brigade (Defence Picture Library)

  US special forces in northern Iraq with Kurdish fighters (Defence Picture Library)

  Chinook helicopter crewmen in northern Iraq (Defence Picture Library)

  A US Airborne soldier drops into northern Iraq (Defence Picture Library)

  River crossing in northern Iraq (Defence Picture Library)

  US Army M1-A1 Abrams tank (Defence Picture Library)

  Australian special forces (Defence Picture Library)

  US Army tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles (AP Photo/John Moore)

  Second section

  A-10 ground support aircraft (Defence Picture Library)

  An Apache helicopter which crashed during preparation at Assembly Area SHELL (Defence Picture Library)

  US Naval special operations units south of Basra (Defence Picture Library)

  US Marine Sergeant Dan Lockward leads his fire team (Defence Picture Library)

  Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay in a mortuary (Defence Picture Library)

  A British Royal Marine fires a Milan wire-guided missile (AP Photo/Jon Mills)

  British gunners from 7 Parachute Regiment Royal Horse Artillery (Defence Picture Library)

  British soldiers of the 1st Battalion the Parachute Regiment (Defence Picture Library)

  Lead elements of the 3rd Battalion the Parachute Regiment advance into the northern part of Basra (Defence Picture Library)

  A British Army Warrior vehicle passes a destroyed Iraqi T-55 tank (Reuters/Chris Helgren)

  A convoy of Humvees of the 5th Marines pictured during a sandstorm (Defence Picture Library)

  A US Army 3rd Division tank rolls across the tarmac of Baghdad International Airport (Getty Images)

  US Marines fight their way through the streets of Baghdad (Defence Picture Library)

  A statue of Saddam Hussein falls at his palatial grounds in Tikrit (Reuters/US Army photo by Staff Sgt. Craig Pickett)

  Saddam Hussein being dragged out of an underground hole by US troops near his home town of Tikrit (AFP/Getty Images)

  The former President minutes after capture (Defence Picture Library)

  Maps

  1. Top: Mesopotamia

  Bottom: Iraq – an outpost of the Ottoman Empire

  2. Top: League of Nations Mandates in 1920

  Bottom: Iraq and its near neighbours in 1960

  3. Saddam’s Iraq

  4. The Eve of War

  5. The Advance through Iraq

  6. The Investment of Basra

  7. Advance into Baghdad

  Acknowledgments

  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

  1

  A Mysterious War

  Some 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.

  The final mystery of the whereabouts of the dictator himself persisted. In the immediate aftermath of the defeat rumours circulated that he had made his escape to a friendly Muslim country. The rumours were cumulatively discounted. Such stable régimes, Libya or Syria, as might have been willing to welcome him were also prudently cautious of the danger of offending the United States. Countries where anti-Americanism flourished, such as Yemen or Somalia, were judged too unstable for Saddam to risk his survival in their turbulent politics. The occupation authority in Iraq eventually concluded that he remained within the country, probably hidden by family or tribal supporters in his home area around Tikrit. Frequent searches were mounted without result. A more methodical procedure proved productive. An intelligence team, by working through his family tree, identified the whereabouts in the Tikrit neighbourhood of residents who might be sheltering him. On 13 December 2003 a party of American troops from the 4th Infantry Division, revisiting a farm already searched but now with better information, uncovered the entrance to an underground hiding place. When the trapdoor was lifted, a bedraggled and heavily bearded Saddam was found cowering inside. He held up his hands and announced, ‘I am the President of Iraq and I am ready to negotiate.’ He was swiftly transferred to American military custody.

  Saddam’s arrest put an end to the last contingent mystery of the war. A greater mystery remained, attaching not to the war’s events but to its fundamental character. How had it been possible to fight a war which was not, by any conventional measure, really a war at all? All the components of a war had been in place, two large armies, huge quantities of military equipment and, that most essential element of modern hostilities, an enormous press corps, equipped and alert to report, film or broadcast its slightest incident. Beyond the battleground, moreover, the world had been transfixed by a war mood. Governments had been thrown at loggerheads over the war’s rights and wrongs, the workings of the great international organizations had been monopolized by debate over the war, populations had marched against the war, the world’s religious leaders had uttered the direst warnings about the war’s outcome, the international media had written and spoken about little else but war for weeks before, during and afterwards. Yet, when war engulfed their country, the people who ought to have been most affected by it, the population of Iraq itself, seemed scarcely to give it their attention. American cheerleaders had predicted that the invading army would be overwhelmed by the gratitude of the liberated once it appeared on Iraqi territory. Opponents of the war, particularly in the media, puzzled at first by the lack of opposition the invaders encountered, consoled themselves with a prediction of their own: that when the American army reached Baghdad, it would be resisted block by block, street by street. There would be a Stalingrad-on-Tigris and the West would regret that it had ever flouted high-minded opinion by mounting such an expedition.

  In the event, the invaders found the population largely absent from the scene of action. There were no crowds, either welcoming or hostile. There were scarcely any people to be seen at all. In the countryside the mud hut dwellings of the cultivators displayed at best a scrap of white flag, flapping from a stick, as a sign the occupants recognized that a war was in progress. Often they gave no sign at all. Herders and ploughmen wended their heedless way about the landscape. Mothers shooed their children to shelter at the sight of military vehicles. Camel drivers stood to gaze. Otherwise the dusty countryside lay empty under a pall of apparent indifference at the world crisis that had come to visit Iraq.

  Civilian unwillingness to engage with the war was matched, and more than matched, by that of the rank and file of the Iraqi army. Saddam commanded some 400,000 men in u
niform, 60,000 of them in his loyalist Republican Guard. Few were well trained and most of their military equipment, once of the Soviet firstline, was now antiquated. The coalition high command nevertheless expected them to fight. Its soldiers, particularly the younger men who had never been in battles, were spoiling to meet the challenge. They were to be largely disappointed. Here and there they found spots of resistance, Iraqi infantrymen who manned their positions, tank crews who exchanged fire. In most cases as the invaders advanced to places where defences had been prepared, however, they found them abandoned, often clearly in the last minutes before action threatened. Pathetic scraps of evidence of occupation lay about, pots of rice, packets of tea, newspapers, discarded clothing and even abandoned boots and weapons. The owners had fled, not to better positions or to regroup, but to go home. Western military intelligence officers identified two waves of desertion: the first following coalition air attack preceding the advance, a second as the sound of approaching coalition armour was heard. By the time the coalition forces actually appeared, the Iraqi soldiers were gone, to disappear into the civilian population and not to be seen again.

  The phenomenon was disconcerting, particularly to military theorists committed to the view that war is animated by politics. Such theorists expect the defenders of a country under attack to resist, because the attack threatens the essentials of their society. They accept the reality of collapse, such as that which overwhelmed France in 1940, but associate collapse with objective military events, such as encirclement or deep penetration of a flank. Failure to fight altogether defies their theories, particularly their central theory that military structures are an amalgam of army, government and people. The circumstances of Iraq in 2003 demonstrate that classical military theory applies only to the countries in which it was made, those of the advanced Western world. Elsewhere, and particularly in the artificial, ex-colonial territories of the developing world, usually governed as tyrannies, it does not. Iraq is a particularly artificial construction; three former provinces of the Ottoman Empire, each inhabited by disparate populations, ethnically and religiously separate from one another. The central and southern regions are respectively Sunni and Shi’a Muslim Arab, the north, though Muslim, not Arab at all but Kurdish. The Ottoman Turks had not treated the three regions as a unit but ruled them separately. It was the British, exercising a League of Nations mandate, who had attempted to unify the country and bequeathed their shaky creation to the successor governments. It had worked erratically at best and only by according dominance to the Sunni of the centre. Monarchy had been supplanted by dictatorship, eventually, in its most ruthless form, that of Saddam Hussein.