Book Review: Understanding Iraq by William Polk

William Polk, whose book Understanding Iraq was published this year,, first went to that country fifty years ago. He knows and reads Arabic, has spent time in the country since, taught at major US universities, and been on the policy planning staff of the US State Department. This is his fifth book on the Middle East. He writes clearly.
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I couldn't have found a better book than this one for giving me a look behind the headlines.

I admit that I knew shockingly little about Iraq before I picked up Polk's book from the New Books shelf of my library. I didn't even know how little I knew. I had a vague notion the Iraqis were less advanced than the Iranians. This doesn't tell anything about Iraq. It only shows that I went to college long ago.

The cover announces that the book covers "the sweep of Iraqi history-from Genghis Khan's Mongols to the Ottoman Turks to the British Mandate to the American Occupation." Unbelievably, this 213 page book with its three useful maps does just that.

Polk begins by giving a context to the Arabic words usually translated as "martyr" and "holy war" in American newspapers, plunging his readers right into Arabic culture. He then divides his coverage of into six sections: Ancient Iraq, Islamic Iraq, British Iraq, Revolutionary Iraq, American Iraq and the final chapter, Whose Iraq?

To say the history of the Middle East is complicated is an understatement. Even if you start in the middle, you'll probably want to go back to scan the first two chapters For those of you who are time-challenged, I offer facts and comments from the last 75 years that stayed in my mind after reading Understanding Iraq. You'll have to imagine the fleshed out book, with its Sumerians and Mesopotamians, believers in quamiyah and.wataiyah, its analysis of oil prices, violent internal politics, and Islamic traditions.

*** During the twentieth century, the city-dwellers of Iraq were the most modernized in the Middle East, many of them well-educated professionals.