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Rory Stewart has covered a lot of ground?figuratively
and literally. He spent sixteen months on his feet traversing Iran, Pakistan,
India, and Nepal. He then embarked on the second stage of his walking tour:
crossing Afghanistan from Herāt to Kabul. The Places in
Between captures his experiences on that epic journey. After a brief rest
in his native Scotland, he returned to Iraq as a diplomat working for the
Coalition Provisional Authority. The Prince of the
Marshes recounts Stewart?s eleven months as the appointed deputy governor
of, two impoverished marsh regions of southern Iraq. The
Prince of the Marshes reveals the difficulties, frustrations, and hazards
Stewart faced as part of the Coalition trying to establish a new Iraqi
nation.
Q: What made you volunteer
for service in the Coalition government in Iraq? What in your background
prepared you for this position?
A: I
had served in the foreign service in Indonesia, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan. I
had, therefore, been close to a number of ?foreign interventions,? and I had
direct experience in post-conflict reconstruction. In every case there were
problems?foreign coalitions are often incompetent and ineffective?but in every
case I found the local population was pleased that the previous regime had been
removed, and felt better off after the intervention than before it. I hoped the
same would be true in Iraq. I was also interested in rural areas such as Maysan,
particularly after spending twenty-one months walking through remote Asian
villages.
Q: What did you see as
your duties as deputy governor, and how did you set about effecting
them?
A: My primary duty was to form an
effective and humane government, able to represent the people, keep security,
and deliver services. My colleagues and I met eight or nine hours a day with
tribal sheikhs, religious leaders, businessmen, and union leaders, trying to
answer grievances, win support, and deter our opponents from rioting or
attacking our building. We also spent months rebuilding half the schools and all
the clinics and hospitals in the province and setting up mass employment
schemes.
As the situation became more difficult, I focused on
implementing quick, visible construction projects to prove that the Coalition
was doing something constructive. Finally, when the insurgents had captured much
of the province, my ambitions became more limited: I aimed to set a personal
example, to demonstrate that we were at least working hard and in good faith.
That decline in ambition represented the increasing desperation of our
administration?our dreams of creating a new political culture were reduced to
spending money, and, finally, to acting out a symbolic role, with very little
power to achieve change.
Q: How did
the situations in which you found yourself compare to your previous experiences
in the foreign service, and to what you had expected to find in
Iraq?
A: Foreign service officers?and I
was no exception?tend to spend their time in embassy compounds, negotiating with
other diplomats. We have little training in the bold executive decisions
required to manage a semi-war zone. I found myself drawing much more on my
experience of walking Asia on foot, having to negotiate my way across remote
Islamic countries and win the confidence of the five hundred villagers with whom
I stayed.
I expected Iraq to be more like Afghanistan, where I could walk
relatively securely in the streets and where many people seemed welcoming. I
particularly expected this in the south, where the Shia Marsh Arabs had suffered
badly under Saddam. Many of the people I worked with had been tortured, and
almost everyone had a close relative who had been killed by the security
service. So I was shocked to encounter immediate hostility in the streets, with
young men spitting as I passed; it made me wonder what had gone wrong. But even
so, it took me a while to realize how serious this instinctive antipathy?part
nationalist, part religious?was going to be for the occupation.
Q: Initially you supported the war in Iraq. Why?
What made you change your mind?
A: I
supported the war because my experiences in East Timor, Bosnia, Kosovo, and
Afghanistan led me to believe that interventions could bring real benefits to
the local people. I knew that Iraqis wanted rights, including the right to vote,
and that they largely hated the brutality of Saddam?s regime. I believed we
could give them a better life. It was the outcome that made me reconsider. If we
had been able to rapidly achieve a more humane, prosperous state, with a limited
cost to ourselves and to the local population?as I believe we had in
Afghanistan?I would still be in favor of the intervention. Instead, tens of
thousands of Iraqi lives and thousands of Coalition lives have been lost, and
hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent to produce a situation that is
still, three years later, fractured, dangerous for everyone involved, and often
brutal and destabilizing for the region. That is what made me change my
mind.
Q: What went wrong with the
Coalition?s attempt to build democracy in Iraq? Could we have done it
better?
A: We made many mistakes, but
in the end, having seen Iraq up close, I think the intervention was always going
to create a mess. Better planning and better tactical decisions might have
improved things slightly, but they were never going to make us successful. The
two fundamental problems were the political culture of Iraqi coalitions and the
nature of Iraqi society. Neither the military nor civilian coalition bodies were
very effective at post-conflict reconstruction; this was partly because the
military was focused on winning battles, the foreign service officers were
focused on diplomatic negotiations, and the development people were focused on
alleviating poverty. None of them had the skills or the stomach for the
uncomfortable politics and compromises involved in reconstructing a traumatized
Islamic state.
Nor, in Iraq, did they encounter a forgiving and
cooperative local population that was prepared to take a generous view of their
failings. Fifty years of nationalism and anti-colonial propaganda, spiced with
radical Islamic ideologies, left Iraqis very suspicious of foreign intervention.
If the electricity did not work, people immediately assumed that it was a
deliberate conspiracy to humiliate the Iraqi people, rather than simply a result
of the Coalition?s incompetence. Iraqi society had also been hollowed out by
Saddam?all power lay in the center and all security was enforced by his brutal
secret services. The Coalition was forced to abolish those services in order to
dissociate itself from the worst atrocities of Saddam?s regime, but neither the
police nor the army could fill the void. Simultaneously, criminal forces,
conservative tribal forces, and religious forces?often newly arrived from
Iran?were flourishing, and there were few liberal figures at a local level
prepared to take political power and fight against them.
Our errors were
many. We probably should have stopped the looting, not abolished the army or the
Baath party, or held elections much sooner?but even if we had gotten these
things right, the situation would not have been much better. The best thing, I
think, in retrospect, would have been to empower local political leaders much
more quickly rather than struggling through our own very limited institutions to
forge Iraq in the Coalition?s own image.
Q:
How well did the civilian authority and the military function as
partners in Iraq during the time that you were there?
A: At an individual level, military and civilian
personnel were often helpful. But they have very different trainings, methods,
and objectives. The military was often disappointed by what they perceived as
civilian?s muddled thinking, political correctness, and inaction, and they were
often forced to do jobs in economic reconstruction or politics that should have
been done by civilians. The civilians were often impressed by the energy of the
military but preferred a more cautious, bureaucratic approach. Neither group was
comfortable with the skills, methods, or objectives required in my role, which
were closer to those of a Chicago ward politician.
Q: Is there a more constructive model for the
Coalition?s response to perceived threats to our security or to rulers we
consider as despots and tyrants? When is it appropriate for us to
intervene?
A: I believe that it is
morally justified to invade another country and topple a tyrant. But the three
real tests of intervention are pragmatic: Will the intervention benefit the
people on the ground? Will it benefit the country that is doing the invading?
And, is intervention actually possible? The lesson of Iraq is that invasions are
intrinsically chaotic, bloody, and uncertain?it is almost impossible to predict
the consequences of toppling a leader and turning society on its head. We
should, therefore, set the bar for intervention much higher and be much more
prudent. We should only intervene in cases of direct and terrible threat to our
national interests or extreme humanitarian catastrophe, such as the Rwanda
genocide, and in cases where either we are confident that the intervention will
work or we prefer the consequences of failure to the consequences of not
interceding.
Q: At this point, what
hope is there of achieving democracy in Iraq, or even of stabilizing the
country? How?and for how long?should the Coalition be
involved?
A: The best hope of
stabilizing Iraq lies with the Iraqi politicians, who are much cannier and more
flexible than we acknowledge, and of course have a much better understanding of
the limits and possibilities of local politics than any foreigner has. Shia and
Sunni Arabs in Iraq have a strong sense of Iraqi national identity that they can
use to avoid civil war. The Coalition?s continued presence in Iraq deters
politicians from making the necessary compromises with their opponents, since
they rely on us to bail them out. Despite our best intentions, the Coalition
often interferes in politics because we do not approve of a candidate?s human
rights record or attitude toward us. We invaded talking about democracy; we
should, therefore, respect the results of elections, empower local politicians,
and allow them to make compromises. This will probably create an Iraq that is
more Islamist, less humane, and less progressive than the Coalition would like,
but it is the best chance we have. I don?t believe that our presence is
improving the situation. There is very little that the Coalition is achieving or
is able to achieve in Iraq?and we need to empower Iraqi politicians to discover
the solutions that we have failed to find.
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