CURRENT AFFAIRSAfter five grim years it hardly seems credible that the US is still mired in the blood and rubble of Iraq, with no coherent plan to deliver itself and the Iraqi people from the folly of its president. It is over seven years since the leader of the free world stood in the ruins of the Twin Towers and told us we would never hear the end of it. How right he was.
Since that tragedy in 2001, an avalanche of commentary in press, journals and books - out of proportion to the gravity of the event - has smitten the reading public, who struggle to make sense of what happened in the Middle East. (The president's diagnosis that "they hate us for our freedom" no longer convinces anyone outside his immediate family.)
Within the piles of print analysing Iraq and its consequences, there is inevitably much repetition, much rant and rage from both sides of the ideological divide. But we can still pick out the authors who probe the interesting questions with the persuasive force and analysis that warrant our attention and reward careful reading. The two books under review fall into that category, both written by journalists with extensive experience of the war zones of the Middle East.
Gwynne Dyer is a Canadian journalist, former academic historian at the British military college at Sandhurst, now a prolific freelance writer on Middle East affairs. He begins this account of Iraq's descent into chaos with the story of the legendary incompetence of Paul Bremer III.
Bremer was a retired diplomat appointed to head the US-run Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) for the reconstruction of Iraq after the war. He set about his task with a zeal born of Boy Scout innocence, getting rid of all the bad guys in the government ministries (who knew how things worked), disbanding the entire Iraqi army and police force and leaving half a million trained fighters to wander the streets and plot revenge.
And then there was the money. So much money and so little idea in Bremer's head or Bremer's fiefdom what to do with it. Around $12 billion (€7.6 billion) - 363 tonnes of $100 bills - were flown to Baghdad in cash and scattered among "government ministries" that barely existed and US contractors with administration connections. Dyer cites a bewildered official of the CPA: "Iraq was awash in cash - in dollar bills. Piles and piles of money. We played football with some of the bricks of $100 bills before delivery. It was a wild-west crazy atmosphere, the likes of which none of us had ever experienced."
In a brilliant second chapter, Dyer addresses the question on everyone's mind since the al-Qaeda bombing of the World Trade Centre. Why Iraq? No one seriously believed the invasion was motivated by Bush's concern to export American freedom to the people of Iraq, or by Blair's worries that Saddam was amassing an arsenal of weapons that could change the face of the Middle East and the Home Counties in 45 minutes. That was for the credulous.
The story of how a cabal of neo-conservatives, including vice-president Cheney, had plotted the Iraqi invasion for 10 years prior to 9/11, and then used the trauma of the Twin Towers to win popular support for their foolish adventure, is well-known in outline. Dyer sees it as only part of the explanation. The real reason, he argues, is not oil, not the threat to Israel, not even the Middle East. The real threat is the rise of China. And the fundamental concern, after the collapse of the Soviet empire, is to establish the global supremacy of the United States, which will prevent enemies and friends alike from ever again challenging its hegemony. "Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival," the neocons wrote in 1992. "We must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." (It is a mystery to the European mind how such disarming frankness about their crude self-interest could be transformed 10 years later into mass American support for a crusade to export the moral values of freedom and democracy to the Islamic world.)
For chapter two alone, Dyer's book is worth the price. There is much more - on relations between the United States and Iran, on the Shia populations in other Arab countries, and on Israel's dilemma as it no longer monopolises US interests in the Middle East.
Dyer writes with easy fluency, with gentle, teasing wit, and with an intelligent balance between the populist and academic that makes his argument all the more persuasive. A better index and a bibliography of sources would not have spoiled the picture.
As senior foreign correspondent of the Guardian, Jonathan Steele comes to his subject with impeccable credentials. He knows the Middle East from years of travelling and reporting - even once being kidnapped - in Iraq and its neighbours. With glowing puffs from Amartya Sen, John Simpson and Noam Chomsky adorning it, the dust cover offers more than a hint of the political stance and authority that inform the book. More impassioned in tone and more academic in style, it covers much of the same territory as Dyer - the diverse experiences and aspirations of Sunnis and Shias, the cause and consequences of the invasion, the catalogue of Coalition venality and incompetence - and reaches much the same conclusion that swift US withdrawal is necessary for the reconstruction of Iraq.
Steele's argument throughout this thoughtful and provocative book is that the architects of the war in Iraq displayed a frightening ignorance of the history and culture of the region they were intending to invade. It is not that their adventure lacked adequate preparation and planning for reconstruction after the inevitable military victory. "The more significant US and British mistake was the lack of analysis and a failure to understand."
This war was lost before it began. In May 2003, when that same leader of the free world swooped down from the air to the waiting aircraft carrier and announced, with a smile or something playing around his lips, "Mission Accomplished", we knew all was lost and we would never hear the end of it.
Bill McSweeney teaches international politics at the school of ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin
After Iraq: Where Next for the Middle East?By Gwynne Dyer Yale University Press, 277pp. £16.99
Defeat: Why They Lost Iraq By Jonathan Steele IB Tauris, 294pp. £20