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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, 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)
True story from inside Iraq by someone with no axe to grind and no agenda
| Customer Rating:  | I cannot recommend Mr. Stewart's book highly enough. He was deputy governor of a region in Iraq for a year, starting late 2003.
A British national with a great deal of experience in Asia and the Middle East (he walked across Afghanistan in 2002, and recounted the experience in The Places in Between--also a brilliant book), he tells exactly what it was like on the ground in Iraq under the Coalition Provisional Authority, from the perspective of a non-government-contractor civilian.
While he didn't speak Arabic, his prior experiences, and fluency in related languages, seem to make him more sensitive to the socio-cultural fabric he was immersed in. This makes the story all the richer: nuances don't seem to escape him.
He does a great job narrating the audio book himself, too. |
On the Ground
| Customer Rating: | Having read "Places in Between" and this book I have a pretty simple thing to say about this author; he writes about what he lives through and what he lives through is worth writing about. I'm his reader. That's the least I can do.
-- Mike Yinger |
Personal Depiction of Governing Post War Iraq
| Customer Rating: | Rory Stewart, who is currently head of an NGO in Afghanistan, was hired at the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003, to be a regional Governor Coordinator, representing the Coalition Provincial Authority in southern Iraq. Stewart, like many CPA administrators outside of the Green Zone, tells a tale of having a huge mandate, little guidance from Baghdad, little money to execute plans, a huge security vacuum, and a multitude of competing interests among the Iraqis he dealt with.
This is an exciting book, and a great depiction of the difficulties of trying to create a success in the first year of the occupation of Iraq.
For historical perspective, this is a great book. |
No good deed goes unpunished
| Customer Rating: | "... (Provincial governorate coordinator) Molly (Phee) would open her office door and step back at the sight of dozens of fat flies lazily circumnavigating her desk ... We tried blue bowls of poison paste and, when that failed, military fogging spray sent by the British Battle Group. These methods made us sick but had little effect on the flies." - Author Rory Stewart
Perhaps the above quote from THE PRINCE OF THE MARSHES could just as well represent the overall experience of the nations of the Allied Coalition during their presence in Iraq since the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
In September 2003, Brit Rory Stewart took up position as the Coalition Provisional Authority's (CPA) deputy governorate coordinator in the Iraqi province of Maysan at the behest of the British Foreign Office; British troops occupied Maysan subsequent to Saddam's downfall. Young Rory was offered the position on the strength of his twenty previous months in Asia, including Afghanistan, and his knowledge of Farsi (though little Arabic).
My description of Stewart as "young" is only supposed as his age goes unrevealed. However, contemporary photos of him in Iraq suggest he was twenty at the time going on fifteen. But never mind, personal gravitas isn't conditional on years, apparently at least when dealing with radical Muslim clerics and quarrelsome Arab tribal sheikhs.
Rory manned his position in Maysan until March 2004, when he assumed the same in the adjoining province of Dhi Qar, this one occupied by the Italians.
Stewart's mandate on both assignments was to help the CPA's governorate coordinator prepare the locals for the resumption of self-government in June 2004. Presuming that Stewart volunteered out of idealism, his own narrative in THE PRINCE OF THE MARSHES may be eloquent argument that no good deed goes unpunished. In any case, he's a better man than I.
The book includes a section of sixteen black and white photographs that only haphazardly relate to the text. Creating a photographic record of his time in-country was understandably not high on Stewart's list of priorities, especially when literally under siege in the governorate's compound. Oddly, however, there's not even one photo of the Maysan strongman for whom the volume is titled, The Prince of the Marshes, Abu Hatim.
As the United States remains mired in Iraq, THE PRINCE OF THE MARSHES stands as a testament to the untenable position of Western reasonableness when confronted with the Middle-Eastern stewpot of long-standing tribal and religious rivalries and hatreds. (True, there's tribalism in the West also. Just go to any city council meeting holding public discussions on a divisive topic. At least in my home town, once the final vote is taken, shooting doesn't break out; the battles shift to the courts. I can't speak for, say, Texas.)
And a simmering Afghanistan, a past thorn in the side to both the British and Soviet empires, can apparently expect a further escalation of Western military involvement. If Iraq is Dubya's War, Afghanistan will be Obama's or McCain's Interminable War. They, and the American public, just don't know it yet.
After finishing THE PRINCE OF THE MARSHES, one must at least stand in awe of Saddam Hussein's ability, brutal thug that he was, to keep the lid on. One is tempted to believe that the country got what it deserved. On the other hand, in reference to his responsibilities in Iraq, Rory makes the point that he and his fellow CPA administrators weren't there as colonial officers in the traditional sense. The young men 19th century Britain sent forth to rule the Empire could persuade with both carrot and stick, the former being sacks of gold and the latter the shooting down of troublesome natives brandishing weapons at the gates of the Residency. In Iraq, the CPA had only the carrot - bundles of dollars and good intentions. Perhaps, in Stewart's narrative, the reader can discern a wistfulness for times past when serving the Queen involved simpler, more direct methods of stern but paternalistic control. After all, the Empire lasted for well more than a century, but dodgy stability, as witnessed by Rory in Iraq, was usually measured in days. The closest he comes to hindsight is his statement in the Epilogue:
"The job of an administrator on the ground in Iraq was not the job of a diplomat, a development worker or a soldier: it was the job of a 1920s Chicago ward politician." |
A troublesome perspective
| Customer Rating: | | The author tells us his experience while never giving his opinion. At the end, it is very difficult not to have a very sad picture of how our intervention in Irak is going to end. It is easy to read, it is important to read it. |
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