The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq
by Rory Stewart
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Book Summary Information
Author: Rory StewartEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2006-07-26
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 416
Publisher: Harcourt
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.
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