The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq

Rory Stewart, who is currently head of an NGO in Afghanistan, was hired at the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003, to be a regional Governor Coordinator, representing the Coalition Provincial Authority in southern Iraq. Stewart, like many CPA administrators outside of the Green Zone, tells a tale of having a huge mandate, little guidance from Baghdad, little money to execute plans, a huge security vacuum, and a multitude of competing interests among the Iraqis he dealt with.

This is an exciting book, and a great depiction of the difficulties of trying to create a success in the first year of the occupation of Iraq.

For historical perspective, this is a great book.

"... (Provincial governorate coordinator) Molly (Phee) would open her office door and step back at the sight of dozens of fat flies lazily circumnavigating her desk ... We tried blue bowls of poison paste and, when that failed, military fogging spray sent by the British Battle Group. These methods made us sick but had little effect on the flies." - Author Rory Stewart

Perhaps the above quote from THE PRINCE OF THE MARSHES could just as well represent the overall experience of the nations of the Allied Coalition during their presence in Iraq since the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

In September 2003, Brit Rory Stewart took up position as the Coalition Provisional Authority's (CPA) deputy governorate coordinator in the Iraqi province of Maysan at the behest of the British Foreign Office; British troops occupied Maysan subsequent to Saddam's downfall. Young Rory was offered the position on the strength of his twenty previous months in Asia, including Afghanistan, and his knowledge of Farsi (though little Arabic).

My description of Stewart as "young" is only supposed as his age goes unrevealed. However, contemporary photos of him in Iraq suggest he was twenty at the time going on fifteen. But never mind, personal gravitas isn't conditional on years, apparently at least when dealing with radical Muslim clerics and quarrelsome Arab tribal sheikhs.

Rory manned his position in Maysan until March 2004, when he assumed the same in the adjoining province of Dhi Qar, this one occupied by the Italians.

Stewart's mandate on both assignments was to help the CPA's governorate coordinator prepare the locals for the resumption of self-government in June 2004. Presuming that Stewart volunteered out of idealism, his own narrative in THE PRINCE OF THE MARSHES may be eloquent argument that no good deed goes unpunished. In any case, he's a better man than I.

The book includes a section of sixteen black and white photographs that only haphazardly relate to the text. Creating a photographic record of his time in-country was understandably not high on Stewart's list of priorities, especially when literally under siege in the governorate's compound. Oddly, however, there's not even one photo of the Maysan strongman for whom the volume is titled, The Prince of the Marshes, Abu Hatim.

As the United States remains mired in Iraq, THE PRINCE OF THE MARSHES stands as a testament to the untenable position of Western reasonableness when confronted with the Middle-Eastern stewpot of long-standing tribal and religious rivalries and hatreds. (True, there's tribalism in the West also. Just go to any city council meeting holding public discussions on a divisive topic. At least in my home town, once the final vote is taken, shooting doesn't break out; the battles shift to the courts. I can't speak for, say, Texas.)

And a simmering Afghanistan, a past thorn in the side to both the British and Soviet empires, can apparently expect a further escalation of Western military involvement. If Iraq is Dubya's War, Afghanistan will be Obama's or McCain's Interminable War. They, and the American public, just don't know it yet.

After finishing THE PRINCE OF THE MARSHES, one must at least stand in awe of Saddam Hussein's ability, brutal thug that he was, to keep the lid on. One is tempted to believe that the country got what it deserved. On the other hand, in reference to his responsibilities in Iraq, Rory makes the point that he and his fellow CPA administrators weren't there as colonial officers in the traditional sense. The young men 19th century Britain sent forth to rule the Empire could persuade with both carrot and stick, the former being sacks of gold and the latter the shooting down of troublesome natives brandishing weapons at the gates of the Residency. In Iraq, the CPA had only the carrot - bundles of dollars and good intentions. Perhaps, in Stewart's narrative, the reader can discern a wistfulness for times past when serving the Queen involved simpler, more direct methods of stern but paternalistic control. After all, the Empire lasted for well more than a century, but dodgy stability, as witnessed by Rory in Iraq, was usually measured in days. The closest he comes to hindsight is his statement in the Epilogue:

"The job of an administrator on the ground in Iraq was not the job of a diplomat, a development worker or a soldier: it was the job of a 1920s Chicago ward politician."

The author tells us his experience while never giving his opinion. At the end, it is very difficult not to have a very sad picture of how our intervention in Irak is going to end. It is easy to read, it is important to read it.

Fascinating read about Stewarts's stint as an "assistant provincial governor" of sorts for the Coalition, running from Sept 2003 to Aug 2004, IIRC.

It reminded me of The Assassins' Gate in its focus on individual Iraqis. Stewart has some experience dealing with Muslim societies from the bottom up and is certainly opinionated about the good and bad points of both the Coalition and the Iraqis. Much of his writing is both sympathetic and paternalistic towards Iraqis.

Basically, his oft-stated point of view goes somewhat like this: Iraqis respect strength, can be back-stabbing when they see weakness, yet are oddly honor-bound and sentimental as well. Saddam's state was a nanny socialist state and Iraqis just don't get that the Coalition can't and won't wave magic wands to run the country. Corruption is supreme.

On the Coalition side, in the Green Zone, unrealistic idealism reigns and very little is done that applies to a post-Saddam Islamic state. The Coalition is depicted as out of touch with the common folk, incapable of knocking heads together politically, cheap on small budgetary items but capable of wasting huge sums of money. Additionally, it is depicted as too reluctant to use force in political affairs (keeping in mind that the US army in 2003-2004 was pretty bomb happy during terrorist hunting).

Many, too many, of the protagonists on both sides die as well.

According to Stewart, too much emphasis is placed on woolly Western civic notions and picking just the "right" Iraqi partners. The most politically successful Iraqis seem to be those who manage to stay distant from the Coalition. Stewart's viewpoint is that colonial officers were infinitely more competent at managing client states than today's globe-trotting, short-rotation technocrats. Yet, he also thinks that delaying elections till things were "just right" was a huge mistake. His ideal occupying power would: a) not hesitate to be tough on civil disorder, b) not try to graft foreign notions (yep, like women's rights in Iraq - I said it wasn't PC), c) really care for the Iraqis' well-being. The Coalition fails on all counts, according to Stewart.

Most chapters are prefixed with quotations from Machiavelli which meshes well with the Prince of the title, who is depicted as an opportunistic political animal that never does anything useful. Maybe honoring that famous Italian is meant to make up for the general scorn Stewart heaps on the Italian army's contributions in Iraq?

This book is opinionated, and not scholarly but it remains a fascinating insight into Iraqi society and the challenges faced by the Coalition in 2003 and 2004 - the message is pretty much that it was never going to be easy and it's made me a little more cautious about second-guessing what was done. I would really rather give it 4.5 stars rather than 5 because there is little in the way of references and it remains a bunch of strung together anecdotes. But just read it and take with a grain of salt.

Long before the United States thought of invading Iraq, Bassam Tibi, a Syrian political scientist, wrote that Arabs are not interested in democracy. This was restating the obvious, but not everybody noticed.

And shortly after the invasion was declared a "mission accomplished," a newspaper columnist, Mark Steyn, rented a beat-up Toyota in Jordan and drove around Anbar and many other places in Iraq for a week, unmolested.

What if instead of unarmed Steyn, Anbar had been occupied by several regiments of American (or Italian or even Spanish infantry)?

Rory Stewart spent nearly a year in Iraq, as a "governate director" of the Coalition Provisional Authority. A more honest title would have been "satrap."

He observed a lot, although he does not seem to have learned much. "The Prince of the Marshes" is his story. The title character was not the most important or even the most interesting of the Iraqis that Stewart tried to govern, but a book entitled "the quixotic Muslim cleric" or "the superannuated illiterate sheikh" or even "the addled seminary dropout" might not have sold as well. "The dishonest general" might have served but Stewart admired the dishonest general (David Petraeus) and does not understand where Petraeus failed in his military duty.

The book is well worth reading, and not only for its easy charm. Whatever one thinks of Stewart's capacity to analyze (in my case, not much), his year in the marshes and few days in the Green Zone was rich in incident and adventure.

The insurgency had not started when he arrived, as early as August 2003, and it was just ramping up by the time Paul Bremer handed over "authority" to an imaginary "Iraqi" "government" and Stewart went off to Harvard to reflect (not too deeply) about his experience.

Scare quotes are needed everywhere. There is no Iraq, nor any Iraqi government, never has been. And authority, as even Stewart figured out, was non-existent.

Although Stewart knew only a few words of Arabic, he brought some experience of Islam, and in particular rural Islam, to his job. A Scot raised in Indonesia, he tramped through Afghanistan and wrote a book about it. He writes that he was "very suspicious of theories produced in seminars in Western capitals" as they might be applied to nation-building in rural parts of the Muslim world. Well, fine, that's obvious, but what theory does Stewart think is appropriate? He never says.

This sounds very much as if he was hoping something would turn up, a famous principle of British public policy.

If any Arabs should have been happy to see Americans and/or Britons, it should have been the Marsh Arabs. Their strange way of life -- and many, many of them as individuals -- was exterminated by Saddam or by the Iranians, or by both. To western ways of thinking, Anybody but Saddam and Anybody but the Mullahs ought to have been preferable, and especially if that Anybody was bringing tens of millions of dollars into an area that had no real economy.

Well, Marsh Arabs don't think like westerners. Duh.

They are, among other things, mightily aggrieved about "colonialism" and "imperialism." To hear an Arab moan and curse about colonialism and imperialism leaves me ROTFL, but Stewart took their complaints at
face value.

As a Briton, though working for a multinational system, he sort of held the title of "political officer," equivalent to a job held by another Briton, a Colonel Leachman, who was shot in the back by an Iraqi patriot in 1920 during a revolt against "colonialism."

Note the date.

The Arabs in Iraq had not shot any Turks in the back -- not in the name of national political sovereignty at any rate -- during 500 years. The amount of "oppression" they had suffered under the English could not have been very great since until 1916 there were no English.

Arab Muslims really do hate us (that is, western infidels) and everything we stand for (including most relevantly here, democracy).

Even if they didn't, that doesn't make Iraq a nation. One of the joys of reading Stewart is his naïve restatement of the obvious. Early on, he decided that the approach of the Coalition Provisional Authority -- trying to deal with and amalgamate various former underdog factions (few of which had any higher ambition than being overdogs for a while) -- was wrong. Stewart thought the CPA should have worked through the sports leagues, the only organizations in the area that cut across all factions.

Do I have to say that if the only thing you have in common is soccer, you don't have the makings of a nation?

Besides, it ought to have been the policy of the United States to support a free and independent Great Kurdistan. Sympathy for, and even occasionally support of, national aspirations of real nations was an American characteristic until the administration of Woodrow Wilson.

It would be worth returning to. Creating a Great Kurdistan would require breaking up Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey - a win-win-win-win situation if ever there was one.

I wouldn't want you to avoid reading "The Prince of the Marshes" just because its author is a fool. There is too much lively incident, too much there between the lines to savor.

Last point: Stewart is an admirer of Petraeus and Odiorno, who were just divisional officers when he saw them in meetings with the civilians of the CPA, for whom he felt deep contempt. (Stewart is not an utter fool.)

Here's the problem with Petraeus. As even Stewart figured out, the foundation of any policy had to be security. It doesn't take a genius to know that security required more infantry. That was the reason for the surge, too little and too late.

President Bush said, publicly, that his theater commanders could tell him if they needed more men. Never mind that there weren't more. It was the duty of Petraeus and his predecessors to tell Bush the obvious: A bigger army was required.

What would have happened after they told him? Only one American politician called for a bigger army, Mitt Romney, and the voters didn't want to hear it. That, however, was not the generals' problem. In a civilian-directed system, they had a professional duty to offer professional advice to the civilian government.