... .  .    .       .joeberkovitz.com

“Prince of the Marshes” by Rory Stewart

November 14, 2006 on 3:13 am | In Books | No Comments

Rory Stewart’s previous book was The Places In Between, a wryly observant, understated account of his walk across remote parts of Afghanistan in the winter following 9/11. I read it straight through on a long flight earlier this year when it came out. It was a compelling narrative of an exotic experience and, more than that, it was also strikingly free of travel-writing tropes. Stewart’s personality, his motivation in traveling, his own history — all receded into the background, leaving nothing in the foreground but the raw facts and perceptions of his encounters with Afghan people, landscapes, weather, animals. It is a transparent book, free of mannerisms and spurious comment. It does not project values onto its subject. In Stewart’s account, the reality lived by Afghans seemed close-by, palpable, and yet, in the end, mysterious.

In the middle of last week I left the office early, coming down with a bad cold. I passed the Globe Corner bookstore and saw a copy of Stewart’s latest book in the window: “Prince of the Marshes, and Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq”. It seemed odd that another Rory Stewart book would be coming out only 6 months after the last one, but it seemed like a good bet for something to read over the next few days.

I had been expecting a travelogue, and hadn’t read any reviews of the book yet, so I was intrigued to find instead an account of Stewart’s year in southern Iraq as a senior civilian official for the Coalition Provisional Authority, dispatched by the British Foreign Office. And quite the account it is, too. Stewart was effectively the deputy governor of Maysan and Dhi Qar provinces, doing his best to oversee a transition from the Coalition to an elected Iraqi government. The stories Stewart has to tell could easily have been couched as damning policy critiques, manic black-humor capers, or military suspense yarns. Unsurprisingly to readers of “The Places In Between”, they are presented as nothing of the sort; the same kind of narrative restraint pervades this book, leaving us free to share the author’s experience and draw our conclusions… some of which, I think, are painful and hard to avoid.

The Iraq of Stewart’s book is a stew of conflicting, obscure actors, violent and comical by turns, contending for a leg up in the vacuum left by the collapse of Saddam’s regime. “Seyyed Rory”, as the Iraqis address him, has two impossible jobs: improving the region’s well-being on a basic level, and developing a group of leaders who can inherit political authority without abusing it too flagrantly. I say “too flagrantly” because Stewart is nothing if not pragmatic: he realizes that there will be no waiting for Western-style individual rights to emerge. And yet, despite the understated tone of Stewart the writer, Stewart the deputy governor does not shrink from cajoling, manipulating and threatening if it will stave off imminent anarchy and killing. Tribes, clerics, warlords, businessmen and criminals: everyone is in the mix, on the make and looking for their chance to emerge on top. If this reminds you of the petty intrigues of Renaissance Italy’s city-states, well, the author got there first; quotations from Machiavelli adorn many of the chapters.

The notion of “political party” in latter-day Iraq is clearly different from ours, as illustrated by exchanges like this:

Each man introduced himself as the leader of a political party… I asked Abu Miriam how many members his party had, expecting to hear — as I did from everybody — “Oh, tens of thousands.”

“One thousand one hundred and thirty four,” he said.

“How do you know so precisely?” I asked.

“Because I personally issued each man with a Kalashnikov,” he replied.

As the culmination of Stewart’s attempts to create a temporary political organ to oversee the transfer of power in Maysan, he painstakingly selects a mix of competing leaders in such a way as to avoid the factional bloodshed that lurks around every corner. The meeting officially creating this council seems successful, and yet, afterwards, there is a somber note:

Abu Mustafa appeared in my office after the meeting, greeted me with a quick smile, but more quietly than usual, and sat, arranging his elegant robes around him. He wanted to talk about our successor — the new council.

“The only problem,” he observed, “is that you and Molly chose the council – we did not elect it.”

“Did we fail to balance the different factions?”

“Balanced? Oh yes, you balanced well,” he said, studying me thoughtfully. Hafiz te shayan waghabit anka a’shia.”

The interpreter, to pretect my feelings, translated, “You memorized some things and you forgot some things,” but Abu Mustafa’s words were a fragment from a poem that begins,

Tell him who claims to know philosophy
You memorized one thing but you missed so many things

To me, this moment embodies the tragedy of the situation in post-invasion Iraq, and the necessary but similarly tragic struggle of people like Rory Stewart trying to do as best they can. As the book draws to a close, the situation spirals into open warfare between rival factions and between them and the CPA. Hope feels distant in the face of utter chaos and the occupation’s inability to maintain even the most basic security. In fact, security only begins to emerge at the end of his story, as elected local leaders take charge — and it emerges hand in hand with massive corruption, petty tyranny, and deprivation of basic rights. It’s clear in this account to what extent the occupation, even while it tries to restore basic services and social fair play, strips the nascent government of its legitimacy in the eyes of Iraqis. And it’s also clear that democracy as an abstract system has no apparent value here. If shackled to the Coalition, there will be little forward movement; if unshackled, then Iraq will have to stumble towards a civil society in its own bloody way, as did Europe.

“Prince of the Marshes” suffers from hasty editing in places, and is not as smooth a reading experience as “The Places In Between”. In a couple of places, it seems as though someone’s pseudonym got changed in mid-paragraph. These are only minor problems, though. I recommend this book to anyone who would like to understand what we don’t understand, and may never be able to understand, about Iraq.

No Comments