The Prince of the Marshes:
And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq
Rory Stewart
(Harcourt, 416 pages, $25)
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.
Those seeking partisan score settling will find Stewart’s book a
disappointment. Stewart’s political views are mercifully
unspecified, though he scorns the range of “amateur pundits” and
“democracy experts” who confidently volunteer solutions for Iraq
while remaining invincibly ignorant of the day-to-day difficulties
of governance. And while he is critical of the Coalition
Provisional Authority (CPA) — with its top-down approach, its
disconnect from local Iraqi politics, and its wildly ambitious
timetable for holding elections — and especially of CPA head Paul
Bremer, whom he portrays as a short-fused bureaucrat with naively
unrealistic expectations of a secular Iraqi democracy, Stewart
saves some of his sharpest reproach for himself.
BETWEEN THE LINES OF STEWART’S book, though, lurks a more likely
culprit. Amid the countless misbegotten administrative decisions,
the bungling civilian leaders, and the occasional sins of the
coalition forces, there are the Iraqis themselves. And their
problems go far beyond the schism between Sunnis and Shiites.
Stewart’s Maysan province is instructive. There are three major
factions, all of them in favor of Saddam Hussein’s ouster, Shiite
in religious affiliation, ruthless in political practice and
animated, seemingly, by a single aim: to destroy one another and
secure power. Consensus eludes even the Islamist hardliners who,
despite their shared fundamentalist social mores and pro-Iranian
sympathies, fissure into “the virtue party” and “the virtuous
party.” Forced to choose between the warring sides, Stewart settles
reluctantly on the tribe led by the dubious “prince” of the book’s
title.
The Founding Fathers they are not. Take the prince. By
reputation — not unjustified — he is a looter, a smuggler and
generally a violent thug. But, in a region populated by what
Stewart calls “men of uncertain provenance” and even more suspect
motives, he is the closest thing to an enlightened democrat. It
gets no easier for Stewart. Choosing a police chief from the
prince’s tribe, Stewart laments that he is “nepotistic, biased,
violent, and semi-criminal.” He’s also the best candidate: “I
didn’t have any ideas on who else should do the job.”
By the end of Stewart’s jurisdiction, the province has fallen to
the mercies of more than 50 feuding political parties, scores of
corrupt politicians and upstart clerics, and an Islamist
“anarcho-militia” bent on imposing its vision of a theocratic state
through a combination of religious injunctions and rocket propelled
grenades, as an impotent governing council looks on. Those few
Iraqis who still have any confidence in the coalition appeal for a
police state on the model of Saddam’s. “This was not,” Stewart
observes with typical understatement, “what the CPA intended for
Maysan.”
COULD THING HAVE BEEN DIFFERENT? Stewart’s mostly impressionistic
narrative supplies no straightforward answer to that question, but
the reader may reasonably conclude that he is of two minds. On the
one hand, Stewart looks approvingly to the British colonial
experience in Iraq. “British officers were Arabists with decades of
experience in colonial administration and a long-term commitment to
the region,” he writes. “They had strong institutions and they had
the freedom to be as Machiavellian as they liked.” These
Machiavellian virtues — resolution, authoritarianism tempered with
pragmatism, a keen awareness of the dangers of seeming weak in the
eyes of the vanquished — clearly impress Stewart, who prefaces
nearly every chapter with a quote from the author of The
Prince.
At the end of the day, though, these are no match for
traditional Iraqi culture. Just about the only Iraqis Stewart
encounters with an understanding of civil society, individual
freedoms, and gender equality are Western exiles. Meanwhile the
only genuinely secular, modern party in southern Iraq seems to be
the Communists. As for the majority, it’s divided between the rural
tribes leery of the political process, and a coalition of Islamic
parties who hope to exploit it for the end of a religious state.
“Better plans, better people, more troops might have given us a
small advantage in 2003, but direct foreign rule, I guessed, was
never going to turn Iraq into a liberal democracy,” Stewart
writes.
It should be noted that Stewart has few dealings with Sunnis and
Kurds, and he nowhere suggests that his experiences in the
British-controlled sphere are endemic to Iraq. Nonetheless,
considered alongside the ancient rivalry between Sunnis and
Shiites, which everyday threatens to erupt into a civil war, the
fact that even Shiite parties with roughly analogous beliefs cannot
govern harmoniously raises serious doubts about the country’s
long-term prospects for democratic rule. Iraqis clearly welcomed
their deliverance from tyranny. Alas, as Stewart’s important book
subtly demonstrates, democracy demands much more.
