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The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq | 
 enlarge | Author: Rory Stewart
Publisher: Harvest Books
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
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Rating:  61 reviews
Sales Rank: 43268
Media: Paperback
Pages: 432
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.3 x 0.9
ISBN: 0156032791
Dewey Decimal Number: 956.704431
EAN: 9780156032797
ASIN: 0156032791
Publication Date: April 1, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: Lots of shelf wear, may contain some notes or highlighting, corners/edges worn and bent, may not include companion materials like cdroms or access codes.
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Product Description
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)
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| Customer Reviews: Read 56 more reviews...
 Do you REALLY want to know? August 14, 2006
Daniel Myers (Greenville, SC USA)
95 out of 98 found this review helpful
Do you REALLY want to know what it's like in Iraq? Probably not - All the more reason to read this book. Rory or "Seyyed Rory" as he is called throughout most of the book has written a well-penned, deadpan account of his eleven months or so as an administrator: Governor, Deputy Governor etc., with the Brits in the South of Iraq. Early on in the book, he reflects:
"I had never believed that mankind, unless overawed by a strong government, would fall inevitably into violent chaos. Societies were orderly, I thought, because human cultures were orderly. Written laws and policy played only a minor role. But Maysan (the province to which he's assigned) made me reconsider." P.78
Thus, we have the quotes from Machiavelli at the beginning of each section bearing, in some way, on the Byzantine, disorderly, well, mess in which he finds himself in each particular situation, with Sheiks, militias, clerics, and divisions and sub-divisions and sub-sub-divisions of each.
Those with axes to grind on either side probably won't fancy this book. It doesn't have the headline grabbing title of "Fiasco" or "The End of Iraq" - Furthermore, he depicts good Brits and bad Brits, good Yanks and bad Yanks, good Iraqis and bad Iraqis, as well as some who are at some times courageous and kind and at others cowardly and corrupt.-In other words, the human condition, not some idealised vision of the (all too many) sides. - All the more reason for those with said axes to drop them and read this book.
Yes, I agree that this book does not have the emotional pull of The Places in Between, Rory's earlier book. But this lack goes pari passu with the situation he is in. He is not on an epic quest with a lovable dog he has adopted.-But, rather, trying to make sense of a political muddle.
I agree with the other reviewers that the droll, British understated humour is a saving grace here. - You will often find yourself laughing in spite of yourself, because this humour is based on not very pleasant facts, such as Rory's visit with the soi-disant "Prince of The Marshes" to a girls' high school refurbished by the CPA with Coalition funds, the contractor for which apparently has (as does almost everyone described herein) skimmed a bit of the funding for himself. The Prince turns to Rory and matter-of-factly says: "Now I need to find the contractor who did this work -tell me his name, and I will rip his tongue out."-End of chapter.
This is the first book I've seen on Iraq since the invasion that doesn't have some preconceived notion to pound into the reader's head. It is worth reading for that fact alone. As for what one should come away with from this book as far as notions about what to do or not do in Iraq, this book will be singularly (and delightfully) unhelpful. As the Oxford-educated student of history, Rory Stewart, puts it here:
"History has few unambiguous lessons." P.46
Seyyed Rory Steps into a Swamp of Intrigue and Obfuscation August 17, 2006
Lightman (New York)
60 out of 63 found this review helpful
In August of 2003, Rory Stewart (known to the Arabs of southern Iraq as Seyyd Rory) "took a taxi from Jordan to Baghdad to ask for a job from the Director of Operations". This was four months after the Coalition invasion. Shortly thereafter Stewart wound up as deputy governate coordinator of Maysan. He became, at age 30, the de-facto governor of a province of 850,000 in southern Iraq, in the immediate aftermath of the war. This is his story.
And an almost incredible story it is - engaging, compelling, and ultimately devastating.
Stewart refrains from analysis and simply tells it like it was, leaving it up to the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. I can't escape the word; the result is, well, simply devastating.
The author navigates two opposing worlds - on the one hand the intricate web of medieval tribal and religious affiliations in the local populations, on the other, the hapless and naive bureaucracy of the Coalition Provisional Authority.
The following description of the composition of the provisional council that Stewart negotiated into being conveys the flavor of the environment in the province: "I knew these people well. Most had killed others; all had lost close relatives. Some wanted a state modeled on seventh-century Arabia, some wanted something that resembled even older, pre-Islamic tribal systems. Some were funded by the Iranian secret service; others sold oil on the local black market, ran protection rackets, looted government property, and smuggled drugs. Most were linked to construction companies that made immense profits by cheating us. Two were first cousins and six were from a single tribe; some had tried to assassinate each other. This dubious gathering included and balanced, however, all the most powerful factions in the province, and I believed that if anyone could secure the province, they could".
And then there are the bureaucrats, dispensing pearls of misguided wisdom from their hardened position in the Green Zone. "An American Arabist governor who favored broad brimmed hats and was rumored to carry a pair of revolvers said `This is not just a military struggle. This is an ideological struggle. We need to engage with Islamicization and Arab socialism, otherwise we might just produce a well-furnished dictatorship'. Strategic Planning replied with a speech about `best practice gaps analysis and privatization'."
This sense of strategic disconnect, initially just eerie, approaches the level of black comedy as the action unfolds.
Through it all Stewart shows himself to be an elegant writer and a very keen observer. This is from his description of a meeting with a young Sadrist cleric: "The beard, which grew over his white starched collar, had tight curls as soft as adolescent down. His feet were half out of his clogs, revealing the hair around his pallid ankles. He was younger than me, and his high black turban seemed over-large. Not glancing at me but instead letting his large dark eyes drift over the cement floor, he talked quietly and slowly, as if he were contemplating not the words but deeper ideas, to which the words could only point".
Highly recommended reading for those seeking understanding as to what went wrong in Iraq.
A witty, charming, humorous book, but it lacks the dazzle of "Places in Between". July 29, 2006
Yesh Prabhu, author of The Beech Tree (Plainsboro, New Jersey)
34 out of 36 found this review helpful
This book was first published by Picador in London in June this year, with the title "Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing in Iraq". It has now been published in the USA by Harcourt with a new title: "The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq".
The Prince of the Marshes is a tribal leader named Abdul Karim al Muhammadawi, who led a group of Shia men who opposed Saddam Hussein's reign over the marshy territory. This tribe fought with Saddam Hussein's army in the 1990s and until the fall of Saddam's regime. The marshes were drained by Saddam's army as a collective punishment to the tribe, to deprive the tribesmen of their source of food and trade. Writing about the marshes, Rory quotes Azzam Alwash, manager of the Iraq Foundation's New Eden project: "In a few short years, Saddam drained them to allow access for his tanks to establish control in the area. After they were dried, the marshes were burned and villages were destroyed."
The Prince is also known as Abu Hatim, "father of Hatim", even though he never had a son called Hatim.
After the invasion of Iraq by the coalition army, Rory Stewart, seeking employment, sent his resume to the occupying British army, but received no reply. Writes the author: "I had resigned from the Foreign Office, but when the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003, I sent in my CV(Curriculum Vitae',resume). No one replied. So in August I took a taxi from Jordan to Baghdad to ask for a job from the director of operations. A month later, the Foreign Office asked me to be the deputy governorate coordinator of Maysan, which lies in the marshes just north of the Garden of Eden."
This is how he describes Iraq as he saw it upon his arrival: "But the province on election day looks a little like a police state. There are armed men at checkpoints every few kilometres up the highway; policemen with vehicle-mounted machine-guns are checking IDs on almost every street corner; no civilian vehicles are allowed to move on the streets. This may be part of the reason `security has improved.' Yet despite the checkpoints, which are in place every day, there are still daily car-jackings and roadside bombs, and towards the Iranian border there's drug smuggling, looting, and kidnapping of children."
As in "Places in Between", the author's much acclaimed book, there are quite a few humorous passages in this book also. Writing about a reporter named James Astill, a reporter for the Economist, interviewing an Iraqi: "Astill's longest conversation with an Iraqi in Fallujah was with a man urinating against a wall with a suitcase on his head, and thus unable to move for twenty seconds." Here is an example of the author's wicked sense of humor: In a lounge the author decides to dance with an attractive woman to while away time, and talks with her in Bosnian as he dances. "But I must have bored her with my bad Bosnian, because she turned her back on me and went to join a group of women who, from their build, looked as though they were in the army".
If you wish to know one of the reasons why the invasion of Iraq has turned into a fiasco, you can gleam it from this minor episode. The military officers of the occupying army know very little about the Iraqi people and their culture, and even less about how to deal with and talk to the Iraqi men. They have only contempt for the Iraqi men. Soon after Rory's arrival in Iraq, this is what a British military officer says to a small group of new recruits at the airport, in case they are taken hostage by Arabs: "Since you will be taken hostage by Arabs, it is likely that they will male-rape you." Also, he says something so outrageous that it's quite unprintable in a decent website. Shocking, isn't it, that this is what the British military officers think of Arabs? And now you know why they failed so miserably in Iraq.
To place this book in context, however, I think it is appropriate to say a few words about the author's previous book, which I liked very much. In fact, I quite marveled at it. In the year 2001, the author walked across Afghanistan and wrote an extraordinary travelogue and memoir titled "The Places in Between". It received much acclaim and well-deserved rave reviews. This book, however, didn't grip me the way his "Places in Between" did. There are mainly two reasons for this, I think. Reason number one is that there is no Babur in this book. Babur was an affectionate, orphan mutt that Rory Stewart adopted as a traveling companion - a retired, burly, courageous fighting mastiff, unloved and much abused, earless and tailless, and as big as a "small pony", whose loyalty, affection and bravery gave the book an emotional depth. Babur is sorely missed. Reason number two is that Rory walked across Afghanistan like a pilgrim, visiting remote, barely accessible villages, and met many poor but kind and generous and proud and interesting people. In this book, however, the pilgrim has turned into a bureaucrat working for the Coalition Provisional Authority, and the change in his status reflects very clearly in his prose. (The generals expect Rory to show the Iraqis who is the real boss, and he is told: Do not promise them anything, deny their requests, and use authoritative voice.)And unlike in Afghanistan where he chose to walk, he now travels by taxis and military vehicles to meet corrupt politicians, crooked warlords, stupid generals, prejudiced and insensitive military officers, and tribal leaders and men with selfish motives.
On the whole, however, "The Prince of the Marshes" is written well. And even though it lacks the sheer dazzle of "The places in Between", it still manages to impress on the reader's mind.
Read it, please.
 Did anyone edit this book? August 10, 2006
James Gish (Middlebury, VT USA)
30 out of 37 found this review helpful
Harcourt should be ashamed of the slipshod job they did in presenting this book to a public eager to read more of Rory Stewart following the superb The Places In Between. I am appalled at the number of typos, grammatical errors, characters and towns whose names differ from page to page, and other signs of editorial shoddiness that make this read like a draft manuscript rather than the polished piece it should have been. Stewart put his life on the line to serve a cause he believed in. The least his publisher could have done is shown a similar commitment to high standards.
Excellent Book!...Required Reading for All Observers of Current Events August 27, 2006
Dr. Jonathan Dolhenty (Port Orford, OR United States)
24 out of 28 found this review helpful
Rory Stewart's "The Prince of the Marshes" is a refreshing change from the spate of simplistic Bush-bashing books about the U.S. invasion of Iraq and its aftermath which have appeared over the past few years. This is not to say that the Bush administration is not deserving of severe criticism over its invasion of Iraq and subsequent failure (so far at least) to bring about a successful "democratic regime change" in that country. But I will say that the vast majority of the books published thus far that I have read about the whole pitiful situation appear so obviously partisan and politically motivated that their objectivity can be seriously questioned. This is not the case with Stewart's book; it is, rather, a "journal" of his experiences during his time in Iraq as an administrator in the Coalition Provisional Authority. It is to his credit that he refrains from explicit Bush-bashing and partisanship and confines himself to a telling of the events of the occupation of Iraq as he perceived them on the ground, upfront and personal, particularly in the southern areas where he was stationed.
The author does not deal with the decision to invade Iraq, nor with the motivations, justifications and other issues leading up to that decision. Furthermore, he does not discuss the strategies or tactics used during the initial military assault. He confines himself to a narrative of events as he encountered them; summarily, he is simply providing us with an experiential panorama of the occupation of Iraq and its problems from his own perspective. So those readers looking for an anti-American or anti-coalition diatribe or the now all-too-common denunciation of "Yankee imperialism" will have to look elsewhere. Stewart does not pass definitive judgment on the Iraq adventure, although astute readers may certainly draw some conclusions regarding the efficacy of the enterprise from many of the stories he relates.
I have to confess to some degree of admiration for Mr. Stewart. He was a civilian administrator in what was basically a "war zone." He was at times "under fire" and yet he steadfastly stood by his post and, if we are to believe him -- and why not? -- performed his duties in a manner reminiscent of the most accomplished diplomat. Back in the very early 1980s, I was entering San Jose, Costa Rica, when all the lights went out -- all over that large capital city. My taxi driver thought that the country was being invaded by Nicaraguan rebels, who had been threatening an invasion. My hotel was locked down and dark and my taxi driver had to bang on the door to gain admittance for me. I recall how scared I was, an American in a foreign country. Later, I landed at the airport in Guatemala City, Guatemala, only to find it surrounded by the army and under martial law. I experienced the same pangs of fear. In neither case was I ever "under fire." Stewart's experiences in being threatened by armed attacks far outweigh my little misadventures. And he was a mere thirty years old at the time; on the other hand, I was an experienced traveler (and political scientist) in my forties!
Most Western readers of "The Prince of the Marshes" will probably be surprised by the complexities of the Iraqi cultural and political arena as described by the author. I suspect that much of the US-coalition's failure in Iraq thus far is due to a lack of knowledge and appreciation for the intricacies of a society that is so diverse and traditionally different from that known in the Western tradition. Stewart does his best to acquaint us with these differences and he is no neophyte regarding these matters. He was born in Hong Kong, raised in Malaysia, spent time as an infantry officer in the armed forces, served in the British embassies in Indonesia and Yugoslavia, and in 2002 decided to walk (yes, on foot!) across Afghanistan. How many of us would contemplate doing that today?
We in the Western world are somewhat grandiose about "theories" regarding "what" sociopolitical principles, institutions, and policies "ought" to be in place in the development of the world's nations. We apparently want to "force" our concepts of democracy onto other "less enlightened" peoples without considering their historical experiences and cultural traditions and, moreover, we want to do that "now." This form of hubris, in my opinion, is not only ill-advised but self-defeating. Stewart, I think, hints at this problem when he states: "Ten years in the Islamic world and in other places that had recently emerged from conflict had left me suspicious of theories produced in seminars in Western capitals and of foreigners in a hurry." Did the Bush administration really "know" what it was doing when it decided to invade Iraq in order to bring "democracy" to the Iraqi people? I suspect not. And much evidence of that is apparent in Stewart's book, even if he doesn't explicitly acknowledge it.
"The Prince of the Marshes" is not a "scholarly" book and it is obviously not written by a Western academician or self-professed "intellectual." That is probably its most important feature. Through the eyes of someone who was there, who appears to have no particular political agenda and who is telling it like he saw it, the reader gets an intimate glimpse into a contemporary conflict where the stakes are high and the outcome is yet to be determined. I can only ask: "Why aren't people such as Rory Stewart, for example, with his range of expertise and experience in the Middle East region, consulted by the leaders of the world's most powerful nations BEFORE a decision is made to interfere in another country's future or, more importantly, to invade a country for reasons which later might be termed "dubious."
This book is must reading for all those interested in current events. It is very readable and surprisingly entertaining at times. Stewart is to be congratulated for bringing his personal experiences to the attention of all of us. Highly, very highly, recommended.
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