Soon after Stewart, a British diplomat and professional adventurer, traveled to Iraq late in 2003 to search for work, he was named a provincial governor. In characteristic understatement, he says of his new role: "I spoke little Arabic, and had never managed a shattered and undeveloped province of 850,000." His job was supposed to be easy: the province, Maysan, nestled along the Iranian border deep in Iraq's Shia south, was one of the country's most homogenous, and nearly all of its citizens had fought against Saddam. Stewart spent most of his time navigating through a byzantine and thoroughly unfamiliar political landscape of tribal leaders, Islamist militias, Communist dissidents and Iranian intelligence agents. When he asks an adviser in Baghdad what his goals should be, his friend responds that if, within a year, the province hasn't descended into anarchy and Stewart can serve him "some decent ice cream," he will be satisfied. Engrossing and often darkly humorous, his book should be required reading for every political commentator who knows exactly what to do in Iraq despite never having dealt with recalcitrant interpreters or an angry mob. In the end, Stewart prevails and is rewarded with an appointment to Dhi Qar, a much more dangerous province with less military support. 16 pages of photos. (Aug.)
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Adult/High School–At the age of 30, the author, a former soldier and diplomat, speaker of Farsi but not of Arabic, was appointed as one of the leading Coalition civilian officials in Maysan, acting as deputy commander first there and then in Nasiriyah during the final nine months of the Coalition's authority in Iraq. Stewart's tale, even more than his complex identity, gives insight into the new and unexpected situation into which the United States and its allies were thrust after toppling Saddam Hussein. His story is one of relations: with his civilian and military counterparts from different nations in the provinces; with the leaders of the Coalition in Baghdad; and with the Iraqis with whom he was trying to build a new order and to whom he was to leave the provinces' leadership in but a few months. He recounts all this in fascinating and stimulating detail. The knowledge and the ignorance, the past history and the present reality, and the effects that they have had and are having become better clarified for Americans at home from reading this book.–Ted Westervelt, Library of Congress, Washington, DC
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In 2003, Stewart, a former British diplomat, joined the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and was posted to the southern province of Maysan, where he found himself the de-facto governor of a restive populace whose allegiances were split among fifty-four political parties, twenty major tribes, and numerous militias. Stewart's account of his attempts to placate the various local figures who continually threaten to kill each other, or him, is both shrewd and self-deprecating. Money arrives from Baghdad in vacuum-packed million-dollar bricks, but there is no budget for such culturally crucial purchases as an ox for the funeral of an assassinated police chief. Stewart's exasperation with the cultural ignorance of C.P.A. directives is as manifest as his affectionate regard for the rhythms and customs of Arab life, a quality that often recalls an earlier generation of British travel writer.
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Stewart is a Scotsman, journalist, and former fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. In 2003, having recently completed a walking tour of western and central Asia, Stewart was appointed deputy governor of two provinces in the marsh regions of southern Iraq. The marsh Arabs suffered greatly under Saddam Hussein; their livelihood was destroyed when the marshes were drained. As Shia Muslims, they were subject to periodic persecutions by Hussein's henchmen. Stewart's prior experiences gave him insight into rural Islamic culture, and he was dedicated to a ground-up reconstruction of the region. However, as his account of his 11 months in Iraq illustrate, Stewart was constantly frustrated by the ignorance, incompetence, and bureaucratic inertia of occupation authorities. Still, Stewart was able to forge strong bonds with individual Arabs, and his description of his personal relations form the core of an interesting look at a region of Iraq rarely covered in the mass media. Jay Freeman
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Review
"A surreal and futile yearlong struggle, scrupulously recounted...Stewart is a fearless reporter and smart observer."
(
Entertainment Weekly)
"Richly detailed, often harrowing...Stewart seems to be living one of the more extraordinary lives on record."
(
The New York Times)
"Both shrewd and self-deprecating...Recalls an earlier generation of British travel writer."
(
The New Yorker)
"[Stewart''s] spare, vivid, understated prose serves him brilliantly."
(
Seattle Times)
"Rudyard Kipling meets Dilbert in this engrossing memoir."
(
Kirkus Reviews)
"A thoroughly readable book."
(
Christian Science Monitor)
About the Author
Rory Stewart has written for the New York Times Magazine, Granta, and the London Review of Books, and is the author of The Places in Between. A former fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, he was awarded the Order of the British Empire by the British government for services in Iraq. He lives in Scotland.
From The Washington Post
In June 2003, a little more than two months after the fall of Saddam Hussein, I traveled to Majar al-Kabir, a small farming town in southeastern Iraq, after an angry mob of Shiite Muslims had set upon the local police station and killed six British soldiers. To cover the story, I interviewed a few dozen people who lived nearby, talked to British military officials -- and met with Karim Mahoud Hattab, a legendary Shiite guerrilla known across Iraq as the "Prince of the Marshes."
During the Baathist dictatorship, Mahoud and a band of fighters had repeatedly ambushed government forces in the dense marshlands of southern Iraq. In a futile attempt to capture him and other Shiite rebels, Saddam Hussein had decided to drain the wetlands, transforming one of the few verdant corners of Iraq into an arid moonscape.
The mercurial Prince, who fingered a chrome-plated handgun while we talked, blamed the attack on the British soldiers on unidentified provocateurs from Iran or agents of the deposed Baath Party. But others I talked to believed that the culprits were closer to home: They pointed to militiamen loyal to the Prince, a supposed friend of America and Britain. I left town both flummoxed and wiser. I hadn't fingered the killers, but I had learned two valuable lessons about Iraq's Shiite south: It was -- and is -- deeply riven by factional infighting, and its warlords often matter more than its would-be occupiers.
Rory Stewart, a young British diplomat who helped to administer two provinces in southern Iraq for the U.S.-led occupation government, vividly depicts this chaotic world in his important and instructive new book, The Prince of the Marshes. Through his descriptions of his day-to-day struggles to mediate disputes, promote democracy, facilitate reconstruction and otherwise manage his patch of Iraq, he lays bare the complexity of America's and Britain's mission in Iraq.
Stewart spent 11 months in Iraq, arriving in September 2003, when he was just 30, and leaving with the formal handover of sovereignty in June 2004. He spins out his engaging, sometimes humorous tale in a series of diary entries, often penned late at night after a grueling day. Armed with rudimentary Arabic, he got out and about for much of his tour -- as he did during his epic walk across post-Taliban Afghanistan in 2002, which formed the basis of his bestselling first book, The Places in Between.
In other words, Stewart's life in southern Iraq couldn't have been more different from those of his cloistered Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) colleagues in Baghdad, who spent their days huddled in the capital's fortified Green Zone debating fine points of constitutional theory. "I spent my first week in Maysan [province] deciding how to mediate in a tribal war, deal with a flood, regulate religious flagellants, advise on the architecture of the souk, patch a split within a political party, set up a television station, arrange an election, and equip the police with guns," he writes. "I operated at a level that had nothing to do with new constitutions."
Stewart's dealings with the Prince and his brother, Maysan province's self-appointed governor, are particularly fascinating. In the Green Zone and the British command in Basra, the Prince was regarded as a hero. His militia had helped depose the Baathists who ran the province; he even had a seat on Iraq's interim Governing Council. But Stewart reveals that the Prince also has a dark side, dealing in smuggling, torture and extrajudicial killing.
After seven months in Maysan, the Prince's stronghold, Stewart was transferred to the city of Nasiriyah, in another southern province. His time in Nasiriyah coincided with a violent rebellion by supporters of the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and a harrowing siege of the local CPA office. He brings to light, for the first time, the negligence and cowardice of the Italian troops there who were part of the "coalition of the willing." While no fault of his own, the change of venue deprives the reader of narrative continuity; characters such as the Prince and Stewart's CPA colleagues in Maysan are summarily dropped two-thirds of the way into the book.
The two provinces in which Stewart worked were almost exclusively Shiite and supposedly quiescent, far from the violent Sunni Triangle that's been the epicenter of the postwar insurgency. The prevailing wisdom in Washington before the 2003 invasion was that Iraq's majority Shiites would be grateful for their liberation and would become willing partners in the transition to democracy. But Stewart encountered a far more complex reality, marked by local leaders' deep suspicion of both the occupiers and each other. Assassinations and kidnappings of fellow Shiites became commonplace.
"Everything seemed to be unraveling at once," Stewart wrote in late October 2003, after one hit and two kidnappings. "We were now facing civil war between the three most heavily armed factions in the province. The Prince's militia wanted to avenge the death of their comrade. The Sadrists wanted to avenge the first kidnapping and the Iranian-linked groups wanted to avenge the second. Every faction saw an opportunity to eliminate its rivals." The standoff happened almost three years ago, but its components -- Iran's meddling, Sadr's ambitions, the militias' brawn -- all sound distressingly relevant today.
Stewart is no Larry Diamond, the former CPA adviser who unleashed a barrage of criticism at the occupation administration in last year's Squandered Victory. Nor is he an L. Paul Bremer, the former Bush administration proconsul, who remains an apologist for everything that occurred on his watch. Stewart is far more nuanced: He supported the mission of bringing democracy to Iraq, and he left Maysan believing that he had changed things for the better. But he also remains clear-eyed about his own shortcomings and those of the overall occupation. As he prepares to leave, he tells squabbling Iraqi leaders in Nasiriyah, "To be honest, I am not very optimistic about this place."
Stewart returns briefly to events in Maysan at the end of the book. New alliances have been formed among some of the rival factions, but all the progressive figures have been pushed aside. The choice then, as it is now across the Shiite south, is between two bad alternatives: Iraqi thugs (in the form of an alliance between the Prince's men and Sadr's goons) or Iranian-backed militias. The result, he writes, is a militia-dominated, failing state that is "reactionary, violent, intolerant toward women and religious minorities" -- hardly "the kind of state the Coalition had hoped to create." By recounting his experiences in Iraq's often overlooked south, Stewart helps us understand how a democratizing experiment that began with such high hopes wound up offering Iraq's majority group such dismal options.
Reviewed by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
THE BRITISH CAMP
A Prince cannot avoid ingratitude.
—Machiavelli, Discourses, Book I, Chapter 29
Pursuant to my authority as Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), relevant UN Security Council resolutions, including Resolution 1483 (2003), and the laws and usages of war, I hereby promulgate the following: The CPA is vested with all executive, legislative, and judicial authority necessary to achieve its objectives . . . This authority shall be exercised by the CPA Administrator.
Coalition Provisional Authority (Iraq)
Regulation Number 1
Monday, October 6, 2003
On the three-hour drive north from Basra to take up my post in Maysan, I passed through the territory the Prince of the Marshes claimed to control. I saw the canal Saddam had dug: some reeds, a few fishermen in tin boats and some water birds. Long parallel lines stretched for miles across the drab earth. There were very few people to be seen: most Marsh Arabs now lived in slums on the edge of cities. Boats were no longer the standard method of transport and the buffalo herds had gone. The thicket of six-foot reeds in chest-deep water that once covered thousands of square miles had become parched and barren mud.
We turned off the highway down an avenue guarded by two rusting Iranian tanks kept as souvenirs, one with a drunken turret. We passed buildings whose roofs had collapsed under the impact of American J-Dam explosives, came up along the edge of a bastion wall serving as protection against car bombs and stopped at the guard house of Camp Abu Naji. Six months earlier it had been the base of the semi-mystical Saddam-funded terrorist group, the Mujahaddin-el-Halq.
A private from the King’s Own Scottish Borderers approached the car, recognized the driver, saluted, and lifted the drop bar for us. On either side were low, shabby concrete buildings, rolls of barbed wire, and corrugated iron. There were soldiers on the roofs, presumably sleeping outside because there was no air-conditioning in the tents. I dragged my bags out of the Land Rover and was shown to a room.
Pushing back the heavy black curtain that served as a door, I lifted the nylon mosquito net and put my sleeping bag on the camp bed and brushed some sand off the tin trunk. The window frames were lined with duct tape and the curtain-door stretched to the floor but, as I was to find over my next six months in the camp, nothing was able to exclude the sand, which accumulated in a thick yellow film across the cement floor and the canvas chair.
We ate at six-thirty. At the entrance to the cook-house an Iraqi in a blue boiler suit was pouring bottled water into a large tea urn. A private stood next to it, making sure that everyone, officer and civilian alike, washed their hands from the urn to prevent the spread of diarrhea.
I sat with a group of young officers and the regimental padre. A subaltern barked, “Red or green?” and returned with plastic cups filled with juice of the relevant and astonishingly intense chemical color.
I was, it seemed, the first civilian to live in the camp. The officer on my left glanced at me and asked, “Do you work at the airport?” He assumed I was a soldier from the divisional headquarters.
“No, I’m the civilian who is setting up the Coalition Provisional Authority office in the province,” I replied.
“What’s that?”
“It’s the new civilian administration.”
“Thank God you’ve arrived at last and we can all go home,” he said, pushing his chair back. “Cake in a box, anyone?”
To shower after dinner I walked around the accommodation block, across the edge of the runway and behind the hangars. There was a roar from the diesel-powered generators, and the beat of the rotor-blade of a Chinook helicopter on the landing zone. I had to use a flashlight to avoid the rubble on the uneven sand. Above, I could see stars in a clear sky and imagine something of the desert just beyond the perimeter fence.
The showers were well-lit. There was a thick slurry of brown mud on the floor from combat boots and camouflage uniforms piled on the wooden benches. While someone cursed the lack of hot water, men dried themselves ostentatiously in the center of the room, talking about the day’s patrols, apparently oblivious to the two female officers brushing their teeth with mineral water at the sink.
The next morning at eight, I called on the colonel of the battle group. He was a slender man in his early forties, with gray hair scraped severely back from his head, dressed, like everyone, in desert camouflage. His office was decorated with the Leslie tartan of his regiment. He introduced me to the province with another PowerPoint presentation; one he seemed to have given many times before. He did not encourage questions.
“Maysan,” he began, “is the size of Northern Ireland, and we are running it with only a thousand men.” He explained that it was a very volatile place, and the battle group were short of equipment and development money. The regional corps headquarters of the Iraqi army had been looted, and all the weapons were now in the hands of the local population. The two key arteries of the province were Route 6, the highway that connected Basra and Baghdad, and the Tigris River.
“As for you, Rory— ” I looked up, midway through my sixth packet of crackers “there are very high expectations here that the British will achieve things. If things don’t happen they believe it is because we are deliberately trying to suppress their economic and political future. There is no possibility of a Baathist revival here. It is a small place and the Baathists would not be able to move here. There is a potential for Shia opposition here, connected to Iran and criminal gangs. I believe that the supervisory committee we have appointed here is relatively representative.”
He brought up a new screen on the monitor: “Vital Ground: Our vital ground is ‘the concept of regeneration.’”
The colonel seemed confident that he could keep order. He had been in command of his regiment for nearly three years and was a month from the end of his time in Maysan. He answered to no one nearer than a brigadier, two hundred miles away in Basra, had absolute control over his men and weaponry, and traveled incessantly. He knew the district well enough to answer the detailed complaints of local mayors. He had become close to the Beni Lam, an “aristocratic” tribe that had once been famous for their horses. But his strongest relationship was with Abu Hatim, whom the colonel described as “our local Robin
Hood, sometimes known as the Prince of the Marshes.” The two of them ran the province together.
I had no opportunityto discuss the briefings I had been given in London, and I left without a clear idea of our relationship. I had been told in Baghdad that, as the deputy governorate coordinator, I was to be “the deputy and alter ego of the governorate coordinator,” in charge of a civilian team of eight that would include a political officer, a development projects officer, and others. But there was as yet no governorate coordinator; a U.S. State Department officer was supposed to be arriving in that role in a few weeks’ time. Nor was there yet a political officer, a projects officer, or an Iraqi governor in Maysan. For the time being, I was a team of one, responsible for overseeing development projects and setting up Iraqi political structures. I had been told to act as something like the de facto governor of the province.
The colonel had been ordered by the commander-in-chief to support our office. But he had little interest in the constitutional relationship between the CPA and the military. He was critical of the CPA, which had so far done little. He was doubtful that I would be able to do much. But, he said, the military were forced to perform political and economic roles that were better done by civilians, and it was about time civilians took up their responsibility. He suggested I could start by getting money. He referred to himself as the de facto governor of the province.
Copyright © 2006 by Rory Stewart
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