‘If you put my cousin on the council, I will slit his throat.’
(Typical threat from an Iraqi sheikh, Occupational Hazards, page 231)

Rory Stewart

Stewart (born 1973) is posh. He comes from a family of Scottish landed gentry. Like lots of poshos born into a family which helped administer the last shreds of empire, Stewart was born abroad, in Hong Kong in his case, and then brought up in Malaysia. He, of course, was sent back to the old country to be educated at Eton and Oxford. After a brief spell in a posh regiment in the British Army (the Black Watch) he went on to work in the Diplomatic Service. Absolutely stock, standard posh-boy career. Then, in the footsteps of the posh travellers of the 1920s and 30s (Wilfred Thesiger et al), he left the Diplomatic Service to undertake a two-year walk across Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal, and then, of course, wrote a best-selling book about the experience, ‘The Places in Between’ (p.8).

Post-war Iraq

Stewart’s posh boy qualifications, his experience in the Foreign Office, his (supposed) knowledge of Arab and Muslim culture (he’s very candid about his shortcomings in speaking or understanding Arabic, as he is about everything else) meant that when the Coalition Provisional Authority (the provisional Western power set up in Iraq after the American invasion of March 2003) put out feelers to the British Foreign Office for volunteers to work as ‘governorate co-ordinators’ in the southern provinces of Iraq (which had been assigned to the British to manage) Stewart was a prime candidate.

In fact, surprisingly, he received no response to his initial application and so, with the confidence borne of his Eton-Oxford-Foreign Office pedigree, he flew to Jordan, took a taxi to Baghdad and lobbied for the job on the spot. He was vouched for by the Director of Operations and Infrastructure at the CPA, Andy Bearpark and was duly appointed (p.73).

Stewart in Iraq timeline

Thus it was that on 28 September 2003 Stewart found himself on a flight from Baghdad down to Amara, capital of Maysan Province in southern Iraq (p.10). Here he worked as ‘governorate co-ordinator’ running a team of ten or so civil affairs officers, alongside the British Army’s (completely separate) military operations for the next 6 months.

Map of Iraq’s provinces, by Orthuberra and published under Creative Commons attribution Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

In November 2003 the American diplomat Molly Phee arrived, assuming the position of Governorate Co-ordinator and Rory switched to become her deputy (p.188). A few days later, Paul Bremer announced the CPA would hand over authority to a provisional Iraqi government on 30 June 2004. In the same month an opinion poll revealed that two-thirds of Iraqis described the allies as ‘an occupying force’ (p.220).

In January 2004 the security situation suddenly deteriorated and the compound at Amara started coming under attack (p.288).

In March 2004 Stewart was moved from Maysan to its western neighbour, Dhi Qar, and its capital Nasiriyah, where he served as senior advisor to the civil affairs team. There were mounting attacks on occupation garrisons throughout Iraq.

In April 2004 the Shiite cleric, politician and militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr unleashed his supporters’ insurgency against the occupying forces, leading to attacks against Coalition offices throughout Iraq, and against Stewart’s compound in Nasiriyah. The very fierce fighting would continue until al-Sadr declared a ceasefire in September 2004.

Meanwhile, in June 2004, the Coalition Authority handed all its powers over to the Iraqi Provisional government, and Stewart’s job came to an end.

He revisited Iraq a couple of times, later in 2004 and in 2005, but his day-to-day involvement at that point came to an end.

A memoir not a history

I bought this paperback when it came out in 2007. I remember being disappointed. Now I realise this was because I was expecting a historical overview, a comprehensive chronological account of the coalition invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, and Stewart’s book is definitely not that. For that kind of objective, historical and analytical overview, I recommend Jack Fairweather’s thorough and authoritative account, A War of Choice: Honour, Hubris and Sacrifice: The British in Iraq (2012).

I now realise I was disappointed by Stewart’s account because it is something else entirely: it is a highly personal memoir of the day-to-day challenges he faced, first in Maysan and then in Dhi Qar, and doesn’t even attempt to be an overall survey.

Instead, it is much more like a diary account (it’s not quite a diary because, as he tells us, he didn’t have time to keep a day-by-day record) of where he went and who he saw, and the issues and challenges he had to address, of the countless conversations and arguments with innumerable Iraqi officials, political leaders, sheikhs and clerics, interspersed with conversations with senior officers in the British Army in both provinces, and occasional meetings with masters in the CPA up in Baghdad. Above all, it is an odyssey through the amazingly convoluted networks of tribes and parties and gangs and warlords and militias which made up the immensely complicated tapestry of political life in his province.

And it is very deliberately provincial in focus. Occasionally he mentions politicking up in Baghdad or outbreaks of violence in the rest of the country, but only the briefest of mentions because his focus is overwhelmingly on the multiple parties and sects and forces at work in his province that he has to deal with.

This explains several things about the book:

1. At 434 pages, it is surprisingly long. But as you get into it you realise this is because it takes a long time to get to know all the many, many tribal and political leaders in Maysan. Stewart’s understanding only inches forward via long conversations, arguments, meetings, pledges, threats and unexpected revelations. In all these ways his book is more like a novel than a history: it’s not to be read for the facts; it’s to be read so as to allow the behaviours, conversations, promises, threats and actions of the various factions to slowly build up a complex, multi-layered portrait.

2. It also explains why, right at the start of the book, there’s a 4-page list of dramatis personae i.e. key figures from the narrative, just as in a classic nineteenth century Russian novel. Initially I thought I could skip these, but slowly realised that reading the book only makes sense if you maintain a good grasp of who’s who and, more to the point, who is conspiring against who, rubbishing them behind their backs, and why. Or at least, why Stewart thinks they’re doing so.

At which point I realised something quite important: that there are more Iraqi, Arab and Muslim voices in this than any other book I’ve read about Iraq or Afghanistan.

The clash of cultures

This point brings us to one of the two central themes of the book which is the immense, unbridgeable cultural gulf between this highly educated, objective and dispassionate civil servant, and the maze of Iraqi politicians he struggles to understand and manage. Over the book’s 430 pages he (and we the readers) obviously gain insight into people’s characters and motivations; but it’s delusive. Tribal leaders still abruptly reverse their positions, or pull out of agreements, for no motive that Stewart can fathom. One minute he’s enjoying a cup of tea in his pokey office in the CPA compound in Amara with a Shia cleric who promises to work with Stewart’s plans to set up a provincial council. A week later the same person is leading an angry mob on the same compound, inciting them to riot, chanting ‘Death to the Coalition’ and publishing a leaflet calling for all devout Muslims to assassinate CPA officials like Stewart (p.228). It is an impassable gulf:

Even in the stable context of our office, with good translators, it was often difficult for us to understand Iraqi guests and for them to understand us…the truth was that the most basic concepts like, ‘civil society’ or ‘sharia law’, meant very different things to each of us. (p.242)

The more he understands, the more he realises he’ll never understand. Not least because quite a few of the local players themselves don’t fully understand what’s going on. In a Hobbesian world where everyone’s hand is against everyone else’s, nobody can be sure of any of their pacts or alliances or deals.

‘These people talk randomly,’ said the governor in a tense, tired, quiet voice. ‘Even among themselves they agree about nothing. It is impossible even to get a consistent demand from them.’ (p.294)

This explains something else absolutely central which is that, when push comes to shove, if you’re in doubt about who was your ally and who was conspiring to have you assassinated, the One Thing that was guaranteed to win you brownie points with almost all the other Iraqi parties, was declaring ‘Death to the West! Death to the Coalition!’

Stewart doesn’t say it in so many words, but it emerges naturally from his countless stories of promises broken and double crosses, that opposition to the Coalition, to the occupying forces, and the West in general, was so vehement because it was, at bottom, the only policy on which almost all the squabbling Iraqi parties could unite on.

Being political illiterates, having absolutely no concept whatsoever of democratic processes or conventions, ‘Death to the West’ was the one and only policy that could (for a while) unite parties, tribes and interest groups who were, otherwise, at each other’s throats (for example, at the first meeting of the council Stewart has himself selected, p.277).

Security, security, security

All of which is related to the other, deeper, central message of the book which comes over loud and clear. Young Rory arrived with the naive belief that people are basically decent; that, if given space, law and order emerges naturally from the culture of a society; and so he initially allowed himself to be dazzled by the enormous number of economic and social development projects being worked up by the ten-person civil society team which he found in Maysan before him.

Only slowly and brutally, does he realise that the locals don’t give a monkeys about educational programmes on human rights, the free market, feminism, federalism and constitutional reform (p.82) or ‘gender-awareness workshops’ (p.83).

What they wanted was security security security. What they wanted was law and order. What they wanted was to be able to walk down the street at night (or even during the day) without being held up, mugged, sexually assaulted, kidnapped and held to ransom, or tortured and murdered.

And that, as it turned out – the provision of basic security, elementary standards of law and order – was something the occupying forces turned out to be completely incapable of providing. And Stewart’s account is a priceless testimony as to why. You might as well try to get a box of frogs to put on a military tattoo as get the endlessly bickering Arabs who Stewart profiles to agree about anything.

The rivals

Amid the blizzard of other projects and responsibilities, the central consuming project of the first, Maysan, part of the narrative, is Stewart’s attempts to appoint a provisional council which can then meet and agree a) a new provincial governor and b) a new chief of police.

The police are poorly trained, cowardly and corrupt (p.83). For example, tribal leader Abu Rashid drafted hundreds of his militia followers into the police, some of them as young as 12. The day before a meeting with Rashid Stewart hears that, when Abu Rashid’s mother had been told to wait when she went to hospital, some of these boys had drawn their weapons and threatened to shoot the doctors unless she was treated immediately (p.87). What can you do with a society split into such fiercely partisan warlord groups, and where that kind of instant resort to extreme violence is normal?

Pretty much all the sheikhs and party leaders he has to deal with are criminals. When Stewart appoints Abu Rashid chief of police it is in the knowledge that Rashid’s cousins run the major smuggling operation in the area. Stewart’s thinking is it’s better to have the big gangsters inside the organisation and let power slowly educate them, than simply making them eternal foes.

Most of the leaders he deals with are involved in some kind of criminal activity, such as smuggling drugs or diesel. Most have threatened to assassinate each other and some are responsible for murders, while most had had some member of their family killed over crime or tribal vendettas. Most of them run extortion and blackmail rackets. All the contractors he allots CPA funds to for ‘development’ projects, skim some or most of the money into their personal accounts, with sometimes hilarious results.

‘There were 54 political parties, 20 substantial tribes, and a dozen leading political figures in the province’ (p.169). Broadly speaking there are:

• tribal sheiks: there are two massive tribes in the province but innumerable sub-tribes and smaller tribes all jostling for power, slow to forgive ancient feuds (‘Most urban Iraqis perceived the sheikhs as illiterate, embarrassing, criminal, powerless anachronisms,’ p.231)
• some of these sheikhs had forebears who had proudly fought against the British occupier and coloniser in the 1920s and so, even if they’d wanted to be co-operative, family tradition and pride insisted that they be seen to be as unco-operative and obstructive as possible
• there are the various candidates and parties which are all fronts for the self-styled Prince of the Marshes, a charming, educated and thoroughly untrustworthy figure, who leads a gang of semi-literate criminals who, immediately after Saddam’s fall, comprehensively looted Amara
• clerics, all Shia, but with a surprising number of fierce rivals; incongruously to British readers, many of these religious leaders have their own militias which regularly kidnap or assassinate opponents
• Iran-backed parties: during Saddam’s long tyranny (1968 to 2003) tens of thousands of political and religious leaders fled abroad; only a handful of them were ‘secular’ (or what passes for secular in a Muslim country); most of them were various flavours of Shia and fled east to Shia Iran; here they were kept on the Iranian government payroll awaiting the day when Saddam (a Sunni) was overthrown; so Stewart had not only to deal with Shia clerics who remained in the country, but with a whole cohort who had returned from Iran and were all, to some extent or other, in hock to Iran and carrying out pro-Iran policies; thus, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which was funded by Iran and represented Iran’s interests (p.65), lobbying for wilayat-e-faqih, meaning government of the jurists i.e. a Shia theocracy identical to Iran’s
• then there were the Sadrists, followers of Shia cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, who shouted the same kind of anti-Coalition slogans from their pulpits as the returners-from-exile but with one key difference: Muqtada had never gone into exile and was a fierce Iraqi nationalist i.e. opposed the Iran-backed parties as violently as they opposed the Coalition; his militia calls itself ‘the Army of the Redeeming Imam’ (p.86); Muqtada ‘created his own armed militia, assassinated clerical rivals, declared an alternative government and called for the immediate departure of the infidel Coalition’, p.253; Stewart makes the point that all the Shia groups seem to be represented by younger and younger men who reject the moderation of their elders; in other words, political Islam was becoming more unstable (p.230)
• there weren’t many Sunnis in Maysan (the further south in Iraq you go, the more Shia it becomes) but by and large the Sunni were more moderate and better educated than the Shia, who they regarded as uneducated, backward heretics (p.46)
• last and least, quavering in the shadow of all these fierce and violent factions, were the handful of genuinely secular, middle class, liberal democratically minded Iraqis and the handful of ‘feminists’; none of these stood a hope in hell of being elected to anything but Stewart and his boss, Molly Phee, appointed some to their provincial council because it’s what the CPA in Baghdad, and all the Western politicians bankrolling the whole thing, had told their populations we were doing in Iraq – building a modern democratic state which respects the human rights of all blah blah blah

The point is that nobody in Iraq trusts anybody else; they are all prepared to believe the absolute worst of all the other tribes, clans, groups, militias, police forces and so on; and, knowing no other way of calmly settling disputes, and also conceiving of power as a zero sum game where you are either in total control or nothing, they routinely try to kidnap or assassinate each other.

A society where nobody believes in anybody else’s good intentions, yes, it probably does require a strong, authoritarian ruler to quash all these rival sources of authority and, above all, of violence. Only a really strong, violent man with a strong, violent security apparatus can quell all the other violent rivalrous groups into submission. Stewart starts off believing this is anti-Arab propaganda, but runs into trouble when Arab after Arab tells him it is true.

‘We Iraqis, we admire strong men. We have tough heads. You must be strong.’ (His first Iraqi interpreter, page 32)

How many Iraqis are you going to ignore when they tell you point blank that their society just won’t function unless it is governed with a fist of steel? It may be racist for us to make such sweeping statements, but isn’t it just as racist to ignore an Arab’s description of their own society because we supposedly know better than they do?

Thus various tribal and religious and political leaders tell him again and again that only an extremely strong, dictatorial authority can enforce security in Iraq (pages 59, 81, 82). When he and Molly finally agree settle on the members of the provisional council they’ve nominated, Stewart gives a characteristically droll summary of them:

I knew these people well. Most had killed others; all had lost close relatives. Some wanted a state modelled on seventh-century Arabia, some wanted something that resembled even older, pre-Islamic tribal systems. Some were funded by the Iranian secret service; others old oil on the black market, ran protection rackets, looted government property, and smuggled drugs. Most were linked to construction companies which made immense profits by cheating us. Two were first cousins and six were from the same tribe; some had tried to assassinate each other. This dubious gathering included and balanced, however, all the most powerful political factions in the province and I believed that if anyone could secure the province, they could. (p.268)

And at their very first meeting the Sadrist member announced that the council was illegal, poisoned by the presence of the Coalition and forbade anyone from taking their oaths. Lolz, as my kids would say.

Or when, after the first guy they appointed as chief of police is assassinated, after much heart-searching Stewart and Molly appoint the Prince of the Marshes’ brother, Riyadh Mahood Hatab on the basis that he is a competent administrator with 20 years experience in the civil service, the respect of the ministry directors, the power of his brother’s militia behind him and contacts in Baghdad. Yes, he’ll do. And then the comic horror with which Molly and Rory listen as the newly installed chief of police outlines his programme: he wants to take full control of the police, set up a secret intelligence service, ban demonstrations, arrest a journalist who had insulted him and expel his Sadrist opponents from the council (p.275).

This is how everyone they try to negotiate thinks about power; it is a zero sum game and, if they are given a position of power, they must immediately move to assume complete control as quickly as possible in order to forestall the inevitable attempts and assassinations and coups which all their rivals will mount against them. Given half a chance, everyone turns into Saddam. No-one turns into the kind of mild liberal democrat the CPA in Baghdad, and their masters in Washington and London, fantasised about.

Violent rhetoric

In the build-up to the Iraq war Saddam Hussein promised the Mother of all Battles but as soon as the invasion started most of his soldiers ran away (some didn’t; some stayed at their posts and fought very hard until obliterated by bombs from the air). I have read serious, sympathetic, Arab writers trying to explain that flowery and impassioned rhetoric is part of their culture. Alternatively, maybe they genuinely are as bloodthirsty and cut-throat as the characters in Stewart’s book suggest.

Stewart visits one of the many schools he’s helped refurbish with CPA money only to bump into the Prince of the Marshes who is ranting about the shoddy quality of the plasterwork, leading up to the blood-curdling threat:

‘Now I need to know the name of the contractor who did this work – tell me his name and I will rip out his tongue.’ (p.98)

Is this bombastic showing off, especially as he said it for the benefit of the school’s headmistress who was standing nearby? Even so, it’s hard to fit this kind of language into anything that might be said in a civilised society. Or was it meant literally? After all, there was always a low level current of mafia-style violence across the province and that was before the insurgency began, which itself degenerated into sectarian civil war, when thousands of people were kidnapped, had their eyes gouged out, their kneecaps drilled through and otherwise hurt in the most cruel and sadistic ways imaginable.

If it was rhetoric, it paved the way for real life atrocities. But more likely, the language just matched the actions.

Tribal fights were still very common – it was not rare for two or three men to be killed in a week in tribal disagreements. (p.143)

Stewart helps a sheikh of the Suwaad tribe who graciously invites him for lunch. Next day the sheikh’s house is firebombed. At an art exhibition he is introduced to Dr Kifiyah, a confident woman who is working for an aid organisation educating women (p.175). He supervises the election of a mayor for the town of Ali Al Sharj. Three days later, the mayor is ambushed and killed (p.226).

The central event of the first section, set in Maysan, is the assassination of the chief of police who Stewart and the CPA had put all their hopes on, which unleashes a kidnapping, and various forms of sectarian violence. The point is that everyone has so many enemies that they’re not at all sure who carried out the assassination.

Under siege

The first 300 pages chronicle Stewart’s time in Maysan. Around page 300 he leaves that post and is driven across the border into Dhi Qar province and on to the Coalition’s base in the provincial capital, Nasiriyah. He discovers it is a far bigger, more populous place than Maysan. He discovers that the team here held elections to appoint a provincial council and they were judged a success, shedding light on his decision to appoint a council, which led to all the problems which made up most of the text about Maysan.

The next most important thing he discovers is the military presence here is Italian and, living down to their hard-won reputation, they are useless. Never on time, never serious or committed, they rarely lose an opportunity to run away from a fight. To be fair this was because, a few months earlier, in November 2003, a huge truck bomb had detonated at the Italian headquarters in Nassiriya, killing 17 Italians. At which point Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi ordered his 2,300-strong contingent not to take any risks. Any more casualties and negative public opinion would force him to withdraw from the Coalition. There were strong political and operational reasons for the Italians’ tardiness and unreliability.

All of which is important because Stewart is in Nassiriya when the dual insurgencies, of Sunnis in Fallujah and Sadrist Shia militias across the entire south, kick off in April, and the CPA compound in Nassiriya comes under sustained attack. It’s a really serious situation, with the compound besieged, running low on water, two guards at the gate are seriously injured, scores of mortars and RPGs attack the compound continuously, the entire civilian staff have to take cover.

Eventually he manages to get them extracted from the besieged base in a convoy of armoured patrol vehicles, only for them to trundle straight into an ambush and be bombarded with machine guns and RPGs and, having remained behind in the base, he has an agonising half an hour wondering if he’s just sent his entire team to a violent death, before getting a phone call to confirm that they had all arrived safe at the allied base at the airport outside of town.

Even here there’s Waughesque comedy, as the incompetent driver of the first APV unexpectedly throws it into reverse, nearly running over Stewart and a colleague who were remaining behind. When his infuriated commander leans down to cuff the harassed driver round the ear, he then accelerates into a pile of barbed wire which promptly tangle up the wheels and prevent it going any further, till the wire is slowly painfully untangled.

There’s page after page detailing the amazing ineffectiveness and cowardliness of the Italians, and it’s not just Stewart who is gobsmacked. A team of British and American security contractors from Control Risk Group (CRG) remain in the base with him and cannot believe how useless the Italians are (pages 390 to 393). Eventually after 3 days of siege a Coalition Spectre plane uses its night sights to locate the mortar bombers and pick them off one by one, killing or wounding the entire insurgent group. Next day the city is back to its normal bustling self. Stewart is full of praise for the consultants (aka mercenaries) who manned the machine gun posts and prevented the Sadrists storming over the walls and massacring Stewart and the garrison.

But Baghdad orders the compound to be evacuated. Obviously, the minute they’ve left the looters move in and strip the place of any moveable values, right down to the wiring, before gutting and burning it.

Once safely ensconced in the Italians’ main base at Tallil Stewart comes to like them. Wherever they go, they build pizza ovens and their food is extraordinary. In fact, once you stop thinking about the Italian Army as soldiers, but actually as great chefs in fancy uniforms, what’s not to love about them?

The CPA

In case I’m accused of being anti-Arab, Stewart also has a chapter devoted to a visit to the Coalition Provincial Authority in Baghdad which overflows with details of the inane, out of touch, ludicrous, over-ambitions of inexperienced Yanks who worked all the hours that God sent and yet somehow presided over a complete shambles (pages 105 to 121). I particularly liked the deliberately comic passage where he describes going to one of the evening discos in the Green Zone and being introduced to two men who were both under the impression they had been appointed acting Interior Minister. A little later he meets two men who both think they are the Media Commissioner (p.112). Chaos.

More seriously, Stewart describes talking at different times to two soldiers, one American, one British, who both try to get him to admit that the whole war and occupation was to do with taking Iraqi oil. If even the troops on our own side believe this myth, Stewart reflects, what hope of stopping most of the Iraqi population from believing it, too (p.108). After all, Iraq is sitting on the second biggest oil reserves in the world and yet throughout the Coalition’s rule, ordinary Iraqis had to form long lines at petrol stations. Why else could that be except that the West was stealing their oil? The real explanation, that Saddam’s extraction and refining industry was on its last legs and insurgents kept blowing up pipelines and facilities, was believed by no-one (p.152).

Talk of blowing up stuff raises the point that the Iraqis devoted an extraordinary amount of energy not just to killing each other, but to destroying the infrastructure of their own country (pages 205 to 206). The Great Looting in the days after the allied victory wasn’t an anomaly but a revelation of the true character of the Iraqis, a nation of looters and thieves.

Long after those days of chaos the looting continues. Everything not tied down is stolen. Factories are looted, warehouses are looted. In January, rioters storm the governor’s compound and loot every single piece of moveable furniture or equipment, even the filing cabinets (pages 289 to 297).

Several times Stewart mentions the practice of Iraqi criminal gangs who blow up power pylons so they can strip the copper from the coil, melt it down and sell it on the black market. The criminal gangs get tens of thousands of dollars from the venture but it costs the Americans tens of millions to rebuild series of pylons and rewire them. Obviously, most of the rest of the population suffers even worse power shortages than they already did.

As soon as he, the Italian garrison and the mercenaries withdraw from the CPA compound in Nasiriyah, it is comprehensively looted and trashed.

In a sentimental mode he describes the huge mudhif, a building built entirely out of marsh reeds using ancient skills of local builders, which had been constructed in such a way as to let light through a latticework of openings. It is ornate and beautiful as a cathedral. The Sadrists burn it to the ground.

When you have a people so absolutely determined to loot and vandalise their own country, what can you do? Leave them to get on with it.

On 28 June the CPA formally handed over authority to local council and governors in Iraq’s 34 provinces. The ones Stewart was involved in immediately plunge into chaos and violence. The Prince of the Marshes promptly allies with the Sadrists against the Iranian-backed parties. He shoots the chief of police of Majar dead. The remaining Coalition compounds such as the one where Stewart spent his first 6 months, in Amara, are now under continual, ferocious attack.

Church and state

It’s my view that it took hundreds of years for us in Britain to break the power of religion over the state. Three hundred years ago it took a civil war and a revolution to loosen the grip of the church over the nation’s political life. During the long Victorian century and well into the twentieth, the Christian denominations still exercised a very negative, anti-progressive influence, especially on what is loosely called the nation’s morals (anti-sex, anti-abortion, anti-free speech, anti-gay). It was a long, hard battle to overthrow religious influence on our national life.

Here, in this book, are countless examples of Muslim clerics insisting that their religion, their religious values, their ancient forms of social organisation and their dark age forms of political process eclipse, trump and obviate the need for ‘modern, ‘western’ ideas like democracy or human rights or women’s rights. A cleric named Seyyed Faqr puts it with particular clarity:

‘What matters is not the law. What matters is God, children, possessions, lives. These things are more important than the law. Forget the law. God is above the law and I represent God.’ (p.222)

But what happens if two clerics claim to represent God, a Sadrist and an Iranian? And if you throw in a Sunni cleric? And one from this tribe and one from that tribe? And they all claim a direct line from God so that they can’t negotiate or compromise? Then you have a recipe for endless civil war, as in Libya, Sudan, the Yemen, Iraq and Syria.

Only when all sides agree to abide by a law which is above all of them, impersonal and objective, and agree to thrash out their disagreements via legal channels, can you have a civil society. This is the lesson the Coalition Provisional Authority should have been trying to teach the fractious Iraqis. A legal system to which everyone submits, an independent judiciary, and an impartial police force, these are the bedrock of a civilised states, not the flashy trappings of elections. Elections and the trappings of democracy are a subset of law and order, which trumps every other concern. (cf p.315)

Humorous stories

Anyway, so far this summary has failed to mention the single most important thing, not about the book’s subject and themes, but about it’s style and manner. For this is an extremely readable and enjoyable book. I thought I’d had enough of books about Iraq and took it down off my shelf one evening only because I was bored watching TV. To my surprise, the next time I looked up, I was on page 50. I was hooked.

Occupational Hazards is beautifully written and by far the easiest to read of all the books I’ve read about Iraq and Afghanistan. A large part of that is down to Stewart’s appealingly British irony and deadpan humour which you may or may not attribute to classic upper-class sang-froid and irony. He expects things to go wrong and is never upset when they do. Many of the accounts of his meetings, with tribal leaders or top army officers, or foreign civilians in non-governmental organisations (NGOs) end with a bathetic, ironic, darkly humorous punchline.

It helps that so many of the facts are themselves blackly, bleakly comical, in the style of Evelyn Waugh’s comic accounts of Africa, walking a fine line between horror and hilarity. The secret is in the very dry, clipped phrasing. Here he is reflecting on the rather ludicrous title the Prince of the Marshes had awarded himself:

In truth, of course, Iraq didn’t have princes any more, and it hardly had marshes. The last princes were murdered on the kitchen steps of the palace in 1958 and disembowelled and mutilated in the streets, where the mob used the Regent’s intestines as necklaces. (p.18)

This is the Waugh tone, the casual, ironic, drawling half-humorous description of shocking criminality or scandalous behaviour:

I had spent my first two weeks almost entirely in my office or in camp and I was eager to visit rural towns, which I had heard were bastions of corruption, inefficiency and political tension. (p.90)

On one of these rural rides Stewart stops at an isolated compound to chat with a genuine farmer, not some politico with an axe to grind:

As I left I asked him what I should be doing. ‘Don’t trust the police chief, he replied. ‘He is a gangster. Don’t trust anyone who lives south of Al Amara. They are thieves and bandits.’
‘But you live south of Al Amara,’ I protested.
‘Don’t trust me either,’ he said. He presented me with a live guinea fowl in parting as a gift. (p.96)

The guinea fowl clinches the comedy of the anecdote. Whether this encounter ever happened or took place as Stewart recounts it, who cares? It’s not as if it made the slightest difference to what actually happened in Iraq. It’s these throwaway details at the end of each anecdote or cadence which give it the true Waugh feel.

The Bazun sheikhdom was in dispute between the two main families, one of which had stolen all the heavy digging equipment from the Ministry of Municipalities and Public Works. (p.234)

And:

We drove past the main government building, which Nate had seen demolished by rockets: only a fragile facade of coloured tiles remained, and a sculpture commemorating the Iraqis’ 1920 uprising against the British. It depicted a British officer being shot in the back of the head. (p.303)

Of course horrible things happen. For example, quite a few of the Western civilians, administrators and soldiers Stewart meets on his first arrival end up dead, shot or blown up in suicide attacks. And then, in April, the four US contractors are lynched and their burned bodies hung from a bridge in Fallujah (p.342) which so infuriates President George W. Bush that he orders the US Army to storm the city to find their murderers and ‘bring them  to justice’ ho ho ho. In the same week Muqtada al-Sadr starts his Shia rebellion across the whole south of the country. Hundreds and then thousands died as a result of these parallel insurgencies, one by Sunnis (Fallujah), one by Shias (Muqtada’s).

Black comedy

An extended comic sequence is provided by the story of the kidnapping of a British hostage, Gary Teeley. The first part is all panic and concern among CPA officials and the military to establish who kidnapped him and why and how to get him back. In the event, some of the many tribal leaders Stewart has been having lengthy discussions with simply turn up at the gates of the compound and hand over the filthy and disorientated Brit, directly to Stewart, in person, expecting thanks.

Over the next few days various other tribal and religious factions, including the Sadrists, contact Stewart to claim the credit for releasing Teeley, even though it seems fairly certain that some of them were the ones who kidnapped him in the first place.

But that’s just the start. Stewart debriefs the shattered and disorientated hostage, who had been kept blindfolded for a week, then packs him into an ambulance to be taken to the nearby Italian hospital. Walking back through the compound he is accosted by an irate British woman who tells him she is a hostage negotiator who has been on high alert for 3 days, why didn’t he contact her? Because he didn’t know she existed. Why did he hand over Teeley to the Italians? Because he clearly needed to go to a hospital to be checked over. Yes, says the woman, but he should have been sent to the British hospital at Basra.

By now Stewart realises there is a propaganda battle going on between the British and Italian military, both wanting to be seen to be the hostage’s liberators, not least for the benefit of the Americans and the CPA in Baghdad. Thus the Italian commander sends an email round claiming the release was the result of the Italians working with their favourite tribal leader, Sheikh Talib of the Beni Rikaab tribe.

But it’s not finished yet. The released Teeley turns out to be selling his story to the papers, and – in the style of Evelyn Waugh’s comic novel of Fleet Street, Scoop – three different British newspapers print three completely conflicting accounts of his ordeal. The Daily Telegraph leads with a big photo of the Italian general shaking hands with Teeley as if the Italians negotiated his release. Then The Sun reported that Teeley had been released by Italian forces who used a helicopter to track a suspicious car to an apartment which they then stormed, discovering the captive bound by the legs. Then The Mail on Sunday led with the scoop that the Italian forces who had been credited with finding and releasing Teeley were in fact elite SAS officers wearing Italian military outfits!

Three different packs of lies, each more outrageously untrue than its predecessor.

The moral(s) of the story

1. Stewart’s book shows in more granular detail than any other account the sheer folly of expecting a backward, illiterate, tribal, sectarian society full of cut-throat, corrupt, criminal and hyper-violent tribal, religious and political leaders to become anything like a democratic society in the sense we understand it.

In Stewart’s account any Iraqi leader who gains even a modicum of power immediately moves to reinforce their position, arm their followers, and harass, arrest or assassinate any possible rivals. Saddam politics. This is what even the Shia Prime Minister, Nouri al-Malaki, did as soon as the Americans finally withdrew, in 2011. I love the fact that the very day after the last US forces withdrew, Maliki issued an arrest warrant for his own vice president, the Sunni Tariq al-Hashemi, who was forced to flee to Turkey and, convicted of terrorism, was swiftly sentenced to death in his absence. Saddam politics.

2. If there’s one message from all this, as from all the other books I’ve read about the British effort in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s not to believe a word about the Britain’s foreign exploits, either a) given in press releases by the military but b) even more by the British newspapers, who will fall over themselves to invent any old lies to promote their respective agendas (The Sun: ‘Our Brave Boys Save The Day’; The Telegraph: ‘Secret SAS Mission’; The Guardian: ‘Shame of British Troops’ etc).

Lasting thought

As I closed the book and reflected on it for a few days, one thought rose above all the others, which is that there are more Iraqi, Arab and Muslim voices in this than any other book I’ve read about Iraq or Afghanistan. OK, not saying things the Coalition or the West or Iraqi apologists or themselves would be very pleased to read. But all the other books I’ve read focus on Americans and Brits and Westerners and the occupiers – Stewart’s book, alone, goes way out of its way to focus on the actual Iraqis he met and talked to and tried and failed to manage.

In fact, this ends up being the conclusion of the epilogue he added to the paperback edition of the book published in 2007. By that point the insurgency had become general and had evolved in many places into a sectarian civil war. Stewart criticises politicians, academics and journalists for dealing in fine words, abstract concepts and abstract statistics.

No one is offering a granular and patient account of the insurgency in all its evolving and surprising multiplicity. We prefer the universal and the theoretical: the historical analogy and the statistics. But politics is local, the catastrophe of Iraq is discovered best through individual interactions.

And it’s precisely a multitude of such ‘individual interactions’, bleakly disillusioning though most of them are, that this impressive, illuminating and drily humorous book offers, in abundance.

Credit

Occupational Hazards by Rory Stewart was published by Picador in 2006. References are to the revised 2007 Picador paperback edition.

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