Pesach Malovany

This is not an inexpensive book, so my expectations were quite high. Although this read took a while to finish, the journey for me was worthwhile.

The author is a retired Israeli military intelligence officer, so he is writing from a position of professional interest in the subject of this book, the Iraqi Army. Malovany's book is extensively subdivided, given the complexity of the topic.

There are a total of five parts to this book, with each part being subdivided into either phases or chapters. Part One, Development of the Iraqi Army and its Campaigns from its Establishment until the War against Iran (1921-1980), has three chapters. The early history of the Iraqi Army is dominated by the British, who needed a native armed force to keep local tribes under control. The Iraqis did not care much for their colonial overseers, choosing a particularly bad time for Great Britain in the spring of 1941 to stage an unsuccessful revolt with some help from Nazi Germany. By the 1950's the Iraqi Army had developed a reputation for toppling its national governments, and a succession of coups ensured that no military leader remained in power for long. Along the way the British found a way to foil Iraqi pretensions on annexing Kuwait in 1961.

That all changed in 1968, when the Ba'ath Party seized power in Baghdad, this time for 35 years. Within a few short years, Ba'ath leaders (including future commander-in-chief Saddam Hussein) sought to move national concerns (and potential future coups) from inside Iraq to external enemies, primarily Israel and Iran. The Iraqi Army pulled off a logistical miracle in October 1973 when it sent two armored divisions across the width of the country to Syria to help save Damascus. By 1979 Hussein had supreme power in Iraq and looked to take advantage of Iran's post-Islamic Revolution chaos by invading that country.

Part Two, Qadisayat Saddam: The War Against Iran differs from the other parts in the book by being subdivided first by phases of the war and then by chapter. So this part contains seven phases that span Chapters 4 through 25. Suffice it to say that this part is the centerpiece of the book given the long duration of the war.

Part Three, The Gulf War: The Conquest of Kuwait and The Mother of All Battles War (1988-1990) covers in Chapters 26 through 33 the military efforts of the Iraqi Army and the resulting Coalition Operations Desert Shield/Desert Storm and the internal Kurdish and Shi'ite revolts that took place in the aftermath. While American see the term "Mother of All Battles" as the punchline for a joke, Iraqis, especially dyed-in-the-wool Sunni supporters of Saddam Hussein, the term is not humerous in the least, especially when Hussein and his minions redefine the meaning of victory in the face of overwhelming defeat by Coalition forces.

Part Four, The Armed Forces between the Two Wars against the Coalition and in the "Decisive War' (Operation Iraqi Freedom)(1991-2003), contains Chapters 34-42 and details how the Iraqi Army, in particular the Republican Guard formations, survived the Mother of All BattlesWar and still provided a basis for Iraqi obstruction to the search and removal of weapons of mass destruction by Coalition and United Nations inspectors as well as the establishment of safe zones for Kurdish and Shi'ite refugees. This part also details the significant changes in the Iraqi armed forces in the wake of the Mother of All Battles War to include the downgrading of regular Iraqi Army formations and the rise in the status of the Republican Guard, Special Republican Guard and the formation of non-Army paramilitary organizations such as the Jerusalem Army and the Fidae Saddam.

Part Five, Compnents of Iraqi Military Power, encompasses Chapters 43-56. I found this part to be the most useful section of the book as it breaks down each part of the Iraqi armed forces, including the makeshift militias that provided the most resistance to Coalition forces during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Each armed force is detailed from personnel recruiting, training, and retentions to equipment issue, logistics and sustainment. Given the profusion of these units and organizations, I am happy the author chose to include this part in such detail.

Finally, the author provides a short epilogue, which is mainly about the psychology of Saddam Hussein, the poor choices he made, and the consequences of his totalitarian regime on the nation as a whole. The author provides two appendices--the first being a list of officers' ranks and the second is a source guide for the honorific titles used by various Iraqi military formations. These names are often duplicated, whereas numerical designations are avoided as an operational security concern.

My overall feelings about this book are mixed. Malovany give us an in-depth look at a military organization about which not much was known prior to August 1990. However, the author's writing can be confusing at times. As many sources are in Arabic, and much scholarship was done in Hebrew, some terms had to be translated twice to find its way into these pages. Apparently some of the translators were not familiar with military terms, so clearing operations during periodic episodes of the Iran-Iraq War are called "cleansing" and "purification". If a hand-to-hand fight is described, it appears as the troops using "hand grenades and cold rifles". If you were expecting fruits from the capture of Iraqi government records during Operation Iraqi Freedom to appear frequently in these pages, you will be disppointed. It is clear that Israeli sources did not work with the captured records, and what information that does appear in the book from that source is cited and footnoted, such as Kevin Woods' excellent "Mother of All Battles" book. The bulk of the narrative of this book appears from open sourced Iraqi civil and military media. The tone of these media reports and interviews is fawningly pro-Saddam, as apparently no major military decision was made without his appearing at the front and taking command, instructing his generals as if they were cadets still at their training academies. There is no independent evaluation of any Iraqi military operation--during the Iran-Iraq War the number of Iraqi casualties and equipment losses came from Iranian sources and vice-versa. The situation gets better from the Desert Shield/Desert Storm era onwards; however, for the sizable investment made in this book I was hoping for a more balanced and nuanced reporting of the Iraqi Army's various campaigns. Alas, in the course of my readings I have realized that such a hope is not realistic, and that is the histories in pages such as this work that will prevail.… (altro)