Kevin M. Woods

This is a book that should have a much wider readership but won't. The authors provide the reader with one of those rare insights into what is happening "over the hill" during a military conflict, a perspective that is possible only with a complete victory over an opponent coupled with regime change. That total victory must include a physical occupation of a country tht allows uninterrupted access to the defeated nation's records archive. Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) allowed those conditions to exist, and this work is the result.

The authors provide a note on sources, an introduction, ten chapters, an epilogue, two appendices, and acronym and abbreviations listing, a list of references, and an index. Appendix A provides a useful Iraq chronology; however, the authors set the date for the opening of Operation Desert Storm at January 7, 1991 instead of January 17. Don't know how that happened...The book is organized roughly chronologically, except that Chapter II, which concerns the Battle of al-Khafji, is located close to the beginning of the book, possible to introduce the reader to the distorted worldview of Saddam Hussein.

What makes this book unique, of course, is its sources. OIF brought the U.S. total physical control of Iraq. That occupation allowed complete access to the government archival records that survived two different military campaigns in 1991 and 2003, along with at least some of the people responsible for what actions were documented in those records. U.S. forces systematically exploited the records, which allowed them to be organized and translated into what the authors cite as Harmony media sources. These records spanned several media types to include textual records and sound and video recordings. The sound and video recordings had to transcribed, and then along with the textual records, translated.

Although never explicitly stated, the U.S. Department of Defense probably was responsible for the records archive exploitation mission, although I know the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) assisted during the exploitation process. In turn, the Department of Defense probably outsourced the actual processing and exploitation of the records. The processing included the task of translation, which the authors note was done inconsistently. After my government experience of nearly 40 years this is not surprising. The contractor hired for this task probably had to hire a number of Arabic linguists of varying capabilities to perform the contract. Arabic is notoriously difficult to translate into English, especially when there are technical military terms involved, and the results are plain to see in the text. Given the complexities of Saddam Hussein's personality, these translations can be difficult to follow.

What is striking to readers about this book is how totalitarian rulers such as Saddam Hussein thrive in a world that they alone define. That characteristic, coupled with a supporting cast of relatives and Tikriti neighbors who bought into Hussein's worldview years ago, allowed a non-descript political operative to rule Iraq for more than two decades. Hussein defined victory or defeat in the Desert Storm conflict not as the Coalition defined it, but in the dictator's own terms. Those terms were always relative to some other historical event or nation, but they were always expressed in such a way as to always bring out that "silver lining" for him. So rather than say that the Iraqi Air Force (IAF) was destroyed or rendered combat ineffective by Coalition air forces, Hussein believed that the IAF "won" the Desert Storm conflict because the Coalition took more sorties to eliminate the IAF than the Israelis took to eliminate the Egyptian Air Force in the 1967 Six Day War.

This book is dominated by Saddam Hussein because the translated and transcribed text establishes the world that Hussein built and his people believed. Conspiracy theories abound in Hussein's worldview as this was the only way to suspend the application of logic to that worldview.
Whenever reality threatened to intervene, Hussein reasserted himself to ensure that the facts as he defined them held every Iraqis' attention. On one occasion during one of several "lessons learned" sessions in the wake of Desert Storm, Hussein charged his military leaders to not use their enemies' statistical evaluation of the conflict--make up their own numbers. And, of course, those Iraqi numbers would reflect well upon the Iraqi military and their President. American readers should be alarmed by the similarity in words and tone between Hussein and the 45th President of the United States. I'm sure that if the comparison would be made openly to the appropriate 40 percent of the American electorate, that comparison would be loudly decried, but I somehow doubt that any of those voters would make the effort.… (meer)