Review: The Prince of the Marshes

Abstract

THE PRINCE OF THE MARSHES And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq Rory Stewart Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2006. 464pp, $24.00 paper (ISBN 0151012350).In another era, Rory Stewart would have made the perfect colonial officer: a Scot, born and raised in Asia, who served in both the British army and the Foreign Office before taking 20 months off to walk across Asia. (One suspects, too, that part of him would have enjoyed it. In The Places in Between, which describes his walk across Afghanistan, he observes, Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitative, but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were [247].) It is the sort of education that makes one suspicious of theories ; produced in seminars in western capitals and of foreigners in a hurry and ingrains a belief in the value of understanding the specifics of a culture. Stewart's second book, The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq, is an account of his experience working for the coalition provisional authority in the Iraqi provinces of Maysan and Dhi Qar.Its approach is, unsurprisingly, rooted in the concrete: How much corruption and violence and incompetence should we tolerate before intervening? When to appease and when kill? In what circumstances were our governments prepared to kill Iraqis and in what circumstances were they prepared to have their own soldiers killed (115)? The lessons the book has to offer are too rich to do justice to in a review, but three are worth exploring: the gap between the Iraqis and those who sought to bring democracy to them, a coalition that could not quite coalesce, and finally, the failure of the Iraqis themselves to work towards a better future.The failure of the coalition to understand those they were in the business of governing shines through in one of the book's funniest moments.Welcome to your new democracy, said the democracy expert. have met you before. I have met you in Cambodia. I have met you in Russia. I have met you in Nigeria. At the mention of Nigeria, two of the sheikhs walked out (265).It is a telling moment: the expert seeing himself as a generous mentor patient enough to enlighten the undemocratic, and the sheikhs-slightly racist (one bridles at being treated like Congo cannibals)-incensed at the presumption. Stewart shows similar differences, unresolved, throughout his narrative (265). believe, he writes in the foreword, was not grand policy, but rather the meetings between individual Iraqis and foreigners that ultimately determined the result of the occupation (xii). By the end of his narrative, that belief has been vindicated.Nor did the coalition members do a better job managing communication amongst themselves. Political appointees in Baghdad betrayed no knowledge of the needs of the provinces. Stewart portrays bureaucrats in Baghdad in all their ineffectuality. But his most damning illustration of the failure to coordinate is set in Nasiriyah, where insurgent attacks on the coalition compound caused him to decide that it was time to evacuate. …