This stunning, close-up, on-the-ground coverage of the labyrinth of war in Iraq — West has just come home to Newport from his 15th visit there — bristles with the details of daily patrols, raids, beheadings, street gangs, criminals, suicide bombers, tribes, insurgents, sheiks, ambushes, military methods and assassinations. Its avalanche of acronyms and euphemisms bombard the reader with blood and thunder, a cinematic sweep of corpses and confrontations in desert dust and urban alleys. This can become numbingly repetitive after awhile, but West has clearly seen it all.

Bing West (see Arts cover story), a marine combat veteran and an assistant secretary of defense for Reagan who wrote a devastating book on the battle of Fallujah, concentrates on “those tactical, human things within a framework for understanding the war.” He meticulously explains that framework from the al-Qaida-intimidated Sunnis in Anbar province –– the “Wild West” –– to the Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad.

The Sunnis rally to the American cause and form the Sawha (Awakening) to rout al-Qaida. The Shiites, the majority in Iraq who have it in for the Sunnis, who supported Saddam, are roused by the cleric Moqtada Sadr and his Jesh al Mahdi party, which with other Shiite militias terrorizes the Sunnis. And this Sunni-Shiite polarity splinters easily into a maze of sheiks and tribes.

To West, President Bush remains ominously detached, substituting “self-certitude for strategy,” letting generals squabble and Rumsfeld call the shots. West’s hero is John McCain, who wants to stay the course, and General David Petraeus, who devises ways to partner with the Iraqis, clean up individual neighborhoods and make the average Iraqi’s life better.

West sees politicians as frustrating military plans. That has always been the case, but it is also the essence of democracy in republics. He lambastes the media for focusing on failures — the murders in Haditha, Abu Ghraib (“abuses … committed by one motley squad”) — instead of successes. He understands the almost mythic distrust soldiers have of politicians.

But if the media and some politicians exaggerate the negative, certainly he exaggerates the positive, seeing the war in terms of “steady progress.” He admires “uniform procedures and a clear chain of command,” but democracies, alas, are messy.

Never does West question whether the Iraq war should have been fought at all. He is superb at describing the trees but ignores the forest. He berates Americans for letting our martial values deteriorate and thinks it’s risky when “our society imposed restraints and expectations that can lead to failure on a future battlefield.” The body count is meticulous, but the soul-searching’s missing.

But then again, maybe his own self-certitude is strategy enough. We are, after all, the strongest tribe.

samcoale@cox.net