Another casualty of the war

WESLEY WARK

The Iraq War By John KeeganKey Porter, 254 pages, $29.95The first valuable insight that the distinguished military historian John Keegan has to offer in The Iraq War is his baffled description of the Iraq conflict as "mysterious." Its casus belli, Iraq's deadly inventory of weapons of mass destruction, has proved elusive. The regime's sizable military failed to fight. Saddam Hussein seems to have taken few sensible military precautions to thwart the progress of the coalition advance, and when U.S. forces entered the streets of Baghdad, the Iraqi government vanished into thin air. It left behind only a Cheshire-cat grin, pictures on playing cards used to identify the most wanted. These observations by Keegan might have set the stage for a prescient journey onto the battlefield in search of answers.