Driven to the Brink
By Alex Selim

The Prince of the Marshes: and Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq
by Rory Stewart
Harcourt (396 pp.) $25

In January 2002, shortly after US forces toppled the Taliban, a Scot named Rory Stewart traveled across Afghanistan alone on foot. He related the observations and studies of his 16-month journey in his critically acclaimed memoir, “The Places in Between.”

What, you might ask, could be crazier than walking alone across a war zone with jihadis on the loose? Perhaps taking a cab from Jordan to Baghdad shortly after US forces toppled Saddam’s regime in 2003 in order to get a position in the Coalition Provisional Authority (my apologies to Nick Horne, the MIPP student who did roughly the same thing).

Rory Stewart’s new book, “The Prince of the Marshes,” recounts the fourteen months he spent in Iraq, where, thanks to his Foreign Service background, he was appointed deputy governor of Maysan Province. Introducing a cast of Iraqi characters whose quirks he details and whose motives he often had to decipher and at times counter, Stewart’s second book offers an intriguing window into the Coalition Provisional Authority’s work outside of Baghdad.

Beginning nearly every chapter with a quote by Machiavelli or Miguel Cervantes about leadership, “The Prince of Marshes” could serve as a guide for anyone serving in a place of authority in a post-conflict situation. With its boots-on-the-ground account of the day-to-day work of a Coalition officer, Stewart details the unending crises that he faced with varying degrees of success.

The province where Stewart was stationed, Maysan, was about the size of Northern Ireland. Predominantly a Shi’a province, its local militia groups overthrew the Ba’ath Party before the Coalition arrived. In the 1980’s its two hundred mile border with Iran made it an important battleground during the Iran-Iraq War. After the first Gulf War, Saddam mercilessly drained the marshes that had been a source of livelihood for many of the Marsh Arabs and inhabitants of the region in retaliation for an unsuccessful Shia uprising.

Because all of Maysan’s residents were Shia, the power struggle within the region did not divide across conventional Sunni-Shia ethnic boundaries. In Maysan, the conservative Muslim followers of Moqtada al-Sadr battled conservative Muslim followers backed by Iran, leaving the few moderate secularists, who lacked a militia of their own and to whom the Coalition would have ideally handed over power, largely powerless in the fray.

As a CPA governorate coordinator, a title that roughly equates to a one-star general, Stewart writes, “I had near-absolute authority over eight hundred and fifty thousand people,” but “from another perspective, I was almost powerless. The Iraqi state was large and functioning, however poorly. I was constrained by the Geneva Convention and occupation law . . . I was a lone foreigner who commanded nobody. If the Iraqis or the British chose to ignore me, there was very little I could do.”

In “The Prince of the Marshes,” an argument for a colonial system emerges, in which an officer who has spent his career gaining knowledge of one region has the power, and thus the freedom, to command the military and the bureaucracy to implement the policies necessary for reform. Instead, many of the Coalition officers knew little about the culture in which they were working and felt a sense of shame at occupying a foreign country, an idea that ran counter to their modern sensibilities. Indeed their modern Western sensibilities often debilitated their ability to manage such an undertaking. “We had been trained in an institutional culture that emphasized prudence, compromise, and a careful drafting; not the bold executive decision required to govern a semi-war zone.”

While his superiors tell him not to make any promises that he can’t keep his Iraqi translators and assistants urge him to make a show of his power, the only way he can inspire the Iraqis’ confidence.

Throughout “The Prince of Marshes,” there is often a clash between the autocratic rule that the Iraqis expected and the liberal, democratic ideals that the Coalition tried to introduce. The Prince of the Marshes, for whom the book is named, was a resistance leader who had waged a guerrilla war in Maysan for seventeen years. With his credibility as a rebel hero and the strength of his military following, he could have easily brought stability to the region. However, to their credit, the CPA did not want to install another strong man, and believed enough in their democratic mission not to replace one Saddam with another. However, seeing the way things turned out in the end, one wonders if there wasn’t a compromise that could have been made between their democratic ideals and the necessity to quell the resistance.

Nevertheless, Stewart argues that the Coalition had accomplished many productive projects successfully but had a difficult time communicating their achievements to the Iraqis. He speculates that it was either the soldiers’ modesty or distaste of politics. However, it did not help that few, if any, really understood the culture and that Iraqis were suspicious of their motives and were often impatient, disappointed or contemptuous of their performance. 

 While many writers and pundits are quick to point to the big picture to explain the failures in Iraq, pointing to the leaders at the top like Donald Rumsfeld or Paul Bremer, Stewart contends that it was the interactions on the micro level, where individual Iraqis and American, British and Coalition members met each other—often fraught with fear, anxiety, misunderstanding and even malice—that decided the fate of the Iraq project.

“The Prince of Marshes” is therefore a valuable look at the trenches where the battle to build a local Iraqi government was fought and a tribute to the thankless, frustrating, yet honorable job the men and women served in the CPA performed.

Alex Selim is a 1st year M.A. student concentrating in Middle East Studies.