This is Part II of a Iraq / Afghan War reading Review. Part I can be found here.

The War in Iraq has been, by contrast, very different from Afghanistan.

John Keegan's book The Iraq War provides readers with a sound strategic and diplomatic overview of the events leading up to war, particularly in helping readers understand the context of the war, the process of the diplomatic dance and the directions of the major players.

Keegan doesn't treat the "march to war" as a process that occurs in isolation, but does a good job of drawing in the many and varied elements that contributed, not the least of which was Saddam's horrific record of human rights abuses, his wars with Iran, Kuwait and the Kurds and his overall history of belligerence. Keegan, one of the world's foremost military historians and the author of such works as Intelligence in War and the superlative The Face of Battle, has penned a dry, somewhat pedestrian work but one that provides a good and exhaustive viewpoint that is free of much of the overt political bile that mars some of the U.S. publications.

Beyond Keegan's contextual work, there are a wide range of publications that cover the actual events of the war itself. The use of "embedded" journalists provided a number of writers with the opportunity to experience the war in a way quite frankly unprecedented since World War II and at a level that lends itself to often highly personal accounts, albeit ones that are sometimes skewed through the narrow and oft-times constrained perspective of the particular journalist.

One of the first books released after the conclusion of the war (the overt formal hostilities at any rate) was The March Up: Taking Baghdad with the 1st Marine Division by Ray Smith and Bing West. Smith and West are both former Marines who traveled with the 1st Marine Division, at the "point of the spear", from Kuwait to Baghdad. Smith and West do an solid job chronicling the dangers and uncertainties the Marine's faced on the march however the book suffers from a decidely uneven editing job at points that detracts from the overall narrative. West and Smith offer little commentary on the political or diplomatic particulars of the war but offer an honest and revealing look at the men placed in harm's way.

Strangely enough, while reading The March Up, I was struck at one point with a startling and eerie sense of recognition as the authors described a skirmish that I had listened to live, courtesy of CNN and my local radio station, while driving to work one day. The contrast was jarring, disturbing and unnerving, listening to a war unfold within the banality of the everyday.