The American Spectator

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p> strong> em> The Prince of the Marshes : br> And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq /em> br> Rory Stewart br> (Harcourt, 416 pages, $25) /strong> /p>

Few subjects have yielded so much unedifying literature in recent years as the Iraq war. Not the least trivial defect of books on Iraq is that instead of letting the facts speak for themselves, they enlist them in the service of predetermined conclusions.

The forensic breakdown goes roughly as follows. For the critics, the missteps and failures of the war can be pinned squarely on the incompetence of the Bush administration (think of Thomas Ricks' Fiasco) and its Manichean vision (Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine). Backers of the war effort, conversely, focus on the larger ideological imperatives behind the war (Ralph Peters' Beyond Baghdad and Never Quit the Fight come to mind) while giving short shrift to the daily turmoil that has seized the county and, it is not implausible to suppose, fatally compromised the mission.

What unites these rival accounts is the absence of one critical element: the Iraqis themselves. Rory Stewart's The Prince of the Marshes is a welcome exception to that rule. Among the more clear-eyed accounts of the reality on the ground to emerge thus far, Stewart's book recounts his time as a civilian administrator of two southern Iraqi provinces, Maysan and Dhi Qar, and performs the valuable task of reminding us that, whatever the errors of the coalition and the strategists in the Bush administration, the fate of Iraq has always rested with the Iraqis -- and the Iraqis -- terribile dictu -- have been unequal to the challenge.

Stewart is well placed to tell this story. Though barely thirty, Stewart, the son of British civil servant and a Scottish national, is already something of an old diplomatic hand. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Malaysia, he has a resume padded with experience in post-reconstruction projects in trouble spots like Kosovo and Afghanistan; a more than theoretical familiarity with the Islamic world; and a compellingly arid cynicism to match. Initially appointed the deputy governorate coordinator of the majority Shiite Maysan province in southeastern Iraq, Stewart is frank about the immensity of his task: "I spoke little Arabic, and had never managed a shattered, unstable, and undeveloped province of eight hundred and fifty thousand." His mission is accordingly modest: To maintain sufficient security so that when a colleague returns in a year's time, he can serve him "some decent ice-cream." It proves a tall order.

topics:
Islam, Books, Founding Fathers, Iraq, Iran, NATO, Oil