The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq
by Rory Stewart
List Price:
Our Price: $1.99
You Save: $13.01 (87%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $1.91 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions
Book Summary Information
Author: Rory StewartEdition: Paperback
Published: 2007-04-01
ISBN: 0156032791
Number of pages: 432
Publisher: Harvest Books
Book Reviews of The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq
Book Review: Playing at satrap
Summary: 3 Stars
Long before the United States thought of invading Iraq, Bassam Tibi, a Syrian political scientist, wrote that Arabs are not interested in democracy. This was restating the obvious, but not everybody noticed.
And shortly after the invasion was declared a "mission accomplished," a newspaper columnist, Mark Steyn, rented a beat-up Toyota in Jordan and drove around Anbar and many other places in Iraq for a week, unmolested.
What if instead of unarmed Steyn, Anbar had been occupied by several regiments of American (or Italian or even Spanish infantry)?
Rory Stewart spent nearly a year in Iraq, as a "governate director" of the Coalition Provisional Authority. A more honest title would have been "satrap."
He observed a lot, although he does not seem to have learned much. "The Prince of the Marshes" is his story. The title character was not the most important or even the most interesting of the Iraqis that Stewart tried to govern, but a book entitled "the quixotic Muslim cleric" or "the superannuated illiterate sheikh" or even "the addled seminary dropout" might not have sold as well. "The dishonest general" might have served but Stewart admired the dishonest general (David Petraeus) and does not understand where Petraeus failed in his military duty.
The book is well worth reading, and not only for its easy charm. Whatever one thinks of Stewart's capacity to analyze (in my case, not much), his year in the marshes and few days in the Green Zone was rich in incident and adventure.
The insurgency had not started when he arrived, as early as August 2003, and it was just ramping up by the time Paul Bremer handed over "authority" to an imaginary "Iraqi" "government" and Stewart went off to Harvard to reflect (not too deeply) about his experience.
Scare quotes are needed everywhere. There is no Iraq, nor any Iraqi government, never has been. And authority, as even Stewart figured out, was non-existent.
Although Stewart knew only a few words of Arabic, he brought some experience of Islam, and in particular rural Islam, to his job. A Scot raised in Indonesia, he tramped through Afghanistan and wrote a book about it. He writes that he was "very suspicious of theories produced in seminars in Western capitals" as they might be applied to nation-building in rural parts of the Muslim world. Well, fine, that's obvious, but what theory does Stewart think is appropriate? He never says.
This sounds very much as if he was hoping something would turn up, a famous principle of British public policy.
If any Arabs should have been happy to see Americans and/or Britons, it should have been the Marsh Arabs. Their strange way of life -- and many, many of them as individuals -- was exterminated by Saddam or by the Iranians, or by both. To western ways of thinking, Anybody but Saddam and Anybody but the Mullahs ought to have been preferable, and especially if that Anybody was bringing tens of millions of dollars into an area that had no real economy.
Well, Marsh Arabs don't think like westerners. Duh.
They are, among other things, mightily aggrieved about "colonialism" and "imperialism." To hear an Arab moan and curse about colonialism and imperialism leaves me ROTFL, but Stewart took their complaints at
face value.
As a Briton, though working for a multinational system, he sort of held the title of "political officer," equivalent to a job held by another Briton, a Colonel Leachman, who was shot in the back by an Iraqi patriot in 1920 during a revolt against "colonialism."
Note the date.
The Arabs in Iraq had not shot any Turks in the back -- not in the name of national political sovereignty at any rate -- during 500 years. The amount of "oppression" they had suffered under the English could not have been very great since until 1916 there were no English.
Arab Muslims really do hate us (that is, western infidels) and everything we stand for (including most relevantly here, democracy).
Even if they didn't, that doesn't make Iraq a nation. One of the joys of reading Stewart is his na?ve restatement of the obvious. Early on, he decided that the approach of the Coalition Provisional Authority -- trying to deal with and amalgamate various former underdog factions (few of which had any higher ambition than being overdogs for a while) -- was wrong. Stewart thought the CPA should have worked through the sports leagues, the only organizations in the area that cut across all factions.
Do I have to say that if the only thing you have in common is soccer, you don't have the makings of a nation?
Besides, it ought to have been the policy of the United States to support a free and independent Great Kurdistan. Sympathy for, and even occasionally support of, national aspirations of real nations was an American characteristic until the administration of Woodrow Wilson.
It would be worth returning to. Creating a Great Kurdistan would require breaking up Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey - a win-win-win-win situation if ever there was one.
I wouldn't want you to avoid reading "The Prince of the Marshes" just because its author is a fool. There is too much lively incident, too much there between the lines to savor.
Last point: Stewart is an admirer of Petraeus and Odiorno, who were just divisional officers when he saw them in meetings with the civilians of the CPA, for whom he felt deep contempt. (Stewart is not an utter fool.)
Here's the problem with Petraeus. As even Stewart figured out, the foundation of any policy had to be security. It doesn't take a genius to know that security required more infantry. That was the reason for the surge, too little and too late.
President Bush said, publicly, that his theater commanders could tell him if they needed more men. Never mind that there weren't more. It was the duty of Petraeus and his predecessors to tell Bush the obvious: A bigger army was required.
What would have happened after they told him? Only one American politician called for a bigger army, Mitt Romney, and the voters didn't want to hear it. That, however, was not the generals' problem. In a civilian-directed system, they had a professional duty to offer professional advice to the civilian government.
Summary of The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq
In August 2003, at the age of thirty, Rory Stewart took a taxi from Jordan to Baghdad. A Farsi-speaking British diplomat, 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, this book amounts to a unique portrait of heroism and the tragedy that intervention inevitably courts in the modern age.
(08/08/2006)
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, this book amounts to a unique portrait of heroism and the tragedy that intervention inevitably courts in the modern age.
General Books
Book Subjects
- Arts & Photography
- Audiobooks on Cassette
- Audiobooks on CD
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Investing
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Computers & Internet
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- e-Books
- Engineering
- Entertainment
- Gay & Lesbian
- Health, Mind & Body
- History
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Law
- Literature & Fiction
- Medicine
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Professional & Technical
- Reference
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel
Most talked about in Iraq, Nation Building, and American Foreign Policy
The U.S. Army/ Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field ManualUniversity of Chicago Press; Published: 2007-07-04; Paperback; Book
Best price: $9.33
Price in other shops:
Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a Warby Bob Drogin
Random House; Published: 2007-10-16; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $10.49
Price in other shops:
Learning from Iraq: Counterinsurgency in American Strategyby Steven Metz
Strategic Studies Institute U. S. Army War Co; Published: 2007-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $33.20
Betraying Our Troops: The Destructive Results of Privatizing Warby Dina Rasor, Robert Bauman
Palgrave Macmillan; Published: 2007-05-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $5.95
Price in other shops:
The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Futureby Vali Nasr
W. W. Norton; Published: 2007-04-09; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.44
Price in other shops:
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraqby Thomas E. Ricks
Penguin Press HC, The; Published: 2006-07-25; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $2.94
Price in other shops:
The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraqby George Packer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Published: 2006-09-19; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.38
Price in other shops:
State of Denial: Bush at War, Part IIIby Bob Woodward
Simon & Schuster; Published: 2006-09-30; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $0.85
Price in other shops:
Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq Warby Michael Isikoff, David Corn
Three Rivers Press; Published: 2007-05-29; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.99
Price in other shops:
Blind Into Baghdad: America's War in Iraqby James Fallows
Vintage; Published: 2006-08-15; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.98
Price in other shops:
Similar Books and other products
The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peaceby Ali A. Allawi
Yale University Press; Published: 2008-03-18; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.19
Price in other shops:
Travels with Herodotus (Vintage International)by Ryszard Kapuscinski
Vintage; Published: 2008-06-10; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.47
Price in other shops:
The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without Endby Peter W. Galbraith
Simon & Schuster; Published: 2007-06-12; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.99
Price in other shops:
The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Futureby Vali Nasr
W. W. Norton; Published: 2006-08-05; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $6.99
Price in other shops:
Arabian Sands (Penguin Classics)by Wilfred Thesiger
Penguin Classics; Published: 2008-01-02; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.49
Price in other shops:
Shadow of the Silk Roadby Colin Thubron
HarperCollins; Published: 2007-07-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $5.75
Price in other shops:
The Road to Oxianaby Robert Byron
Oxford University Press, USA; Published: 2007-05-18; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.97
Price in other shops:
Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (Vintage)by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Vintage; Published: 2007-09-04; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.49
Price in other shops:
The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Talibanby Sarah Chayes
Penguin Press HC, The; Published: 2006-08-17; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $6.94
Price in other shops:
The Places In Betweenby Rory Stewart
Harvest Books; Published: 2006-05-08; Paperback; Book
Best price: $2.83
Price in other shops: