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In August 2003, at the age of thirty, Rory Stewart took a taxi from Jordan to Baghdad. A Farsi-speaking British diplomat who had recently completed an epic walk from Turkey to Bangladesh, he was soon appointed deputy governor of Amarah and then Nasiriyah, provinces in the remote, impoverished marsh regions of southern Iraq. He spent the next eleven months negotiating hostage releases, holding elections, and splicing together some semblance of an infrastructure for a population of millions teetering on the brink of civil war. The Prince of the Marshes tells the story of Stewart's year. As a participant he takes us inside the occupation and beyond the Green Zone, introducing us to a colorful cast of Iraqis and revealing the complexity and fragility of a society we struggle to understand. By turns funny and harrowing, moving and incisive, it amounts to a unique portrait of heroism and the tragedy that intervention inevitably courts in the modern age.… (more)
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Stewart comes across as sensible, and reasonably alert to local culture and nuance - although he's clearly a thorn in the side of some of his colleagues. At one point he laments, "we were not allowed to return to our office [after a serious insurgent attack]. My superiors said that whatever my work had been, it wasn't worth getting killed for. This seemed a pretty depressing statement of how serious we were about the occupation". This brought me up short when I first read it - but it fitted with the overall picture of the lack of clear thinking about what the conflict aimed to achieve. The overwhelming impression is that the people who were setting the agenda believed that anything was possible, however limited the resources - from time and money to people and skills.
In particular, the question that came out most strongly for me was that of security. Restoring security was the linchpin of everything the Coalition Provisional Authority was trying to achieve - so, expeditiously, they selected existing networks and groups who could act as a police force. But this ignored the fact that while in the developed world we implicitly accept the social contract involved (that the state is entitled to the monopoly of force because it also has responsibilities to use that force for the good of the people), there was nothing in ordinary Iraqis' experience to explain this - making the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate use of force much more arbitrary.
Stewart does not discuss this directly - and indeed, in the main body of the book, says little about his feelings about the job he had been assigned. However, in his epilogue (which I think was added to the paperback version of the book), he argues clearly that only the Iraqi people can credibly tackle the problems which they are facing.
Stewart craftily notes a similar history has often dogged the region even as long as four thousand years ago when invaders routed King Sulgi of Ur and looted his treasure.
The publisher's proofreading is notably deficient.
Overall, a fascinating look into how Iraq's provinces were lead in the early days of the occupation, and how any success was more luck and force of will and firepower than a thought out effort by the occupying Americans.
If you've ever wondered what went right in Iraq, what went wrong, and why I would vote for David Petraeus as dictator of the world, you'll find out here. Extremely interesting reading; and you'll learn a great deal about the cultures of the Iraqis (who don't deserve the hand history, by which I mean Saddam, dealt them, but many of whom aren't trying all that hard to improve it), the US military (much more principled, and indeed more intellectual, than Hollywood would have you think), and the Italians (if you think they're any less contemptible than they were in WWII, you're wrong).