Understanding Iraq by William Polk will make your blood boil, your head throb, and your stomach turn. You'll either be so mad that an author like Polk could be so good with history and so bad with current events or mad that he could write so passionately about history and be so level-headed with current events. You'll love or hate this book but its pretty hard to be neutral.
Polk covers thousands of years in just a few pages which I find delightful because I really don't want to know the details of all the Ottoman dynasties or Arab Bedouins who have crossed the land we now call Iraq. But Polk tells enough that you certainly are left with the impression that Iraq has always "belonged" to someone else; they've never really had a chance to be their own - until Sadam, that is. For hundreds of years it was their location that people coveted, certainly not the desert. For the past 100 years it is exactly the desert that is coveted, or at least the oil underneath that desert.
The most interesting thing learned from the book is how the British almost exactly 80 years ago felt "mandated" to take over Iraq and "teach" them how to govern themselves. There were plenty of pretexts to the takeover, none of them the real one that Great Britain wanted control of the oil fields and potential oil reserves. And for the next 28 years, Great Britain was involved in a never ending war of insurgency and sectarian violence. Those of us who never studied this history will just have to repeat it (although I certainly hope not for the next 28 years).
There is no love lost between Polk and the current "neo-conservative" administration in Washington, so the final chapters of this book read like worst review ever of the current war in Iraq. But his description does make sense in context of history and it does echo many of the news reports we hear daily.
It's a short, easy to read book. It's dealing with the contents that is difficult.
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