Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing in Iraq

I had this book AND 'The Prince of the Marshes' recommended to me by Amazon. I looked carefully at both descriptions and although I was suspicious because the titles are so similar - since they had different ISBNs - I ordered both. The content of both books is identical. Please don't make the mistake I did - if you are tempted to buy 'The Prince of the Marshes' DON'T - you only need one of these. Haven't read it yet so can't review it. I filled in the stars because I had to.

Not the best book about Iraq (0/1 people found this helpful)

I was not enjoying this book very much and, unusually for me, did not even finish it. Far from being an easy read, to me it seemed disjointed and confusing. What could have been an interesting anecdote too often ended abruptly with no clear explanation of why an event was relevant. I've read a few books about governing post-invasion Iraq and this isn't one of the better ones.

WHERE HAVE AL THE QAEDA GONE? (7/8 people found this helpful)

In the absence of an index, I can't easily verify whether Al Qaeda get only one solitary mention (and that as just one of a list of suspects) in all the 400-odd pages of this book. They are conspicuous by their absence throughout, and that strikes me as being one of the most significant aspects of the story. To this day I am hearing about the need to defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq, and to this day I am puzzled as to what makes that so important. If we want to find their local operatives who actually plan the bombings in America and Europe we ought to be searching in Europe; and if we want to find their main leadership we should look in Afghanistan or Pakistan. However if the Al Qaeda presence in Iraq is as insignificant as it might seem from Stewart's narrative then it adds to the sense of confusion regarding the coalition's objectives.

Stewart served for a year as Deputy Governorate Coordinator in two provinces, often being left in effective charge. He was no more than a freelance contractor, but his previous experience ensured that his job-application was gratefully snapped up by HM Foreign Office, doubtless short of volunteers from within its own ranks. He restricts his narrative to what he saw at first-hand. He took up his post in a genuine attempt to make the ostensible coalition objective of a democratic and peaceful Iraq work, and he does not analyse or evaluate that and the other supposed objectives. However his direct involvement included reporting periodically to Bremer in Baghdad, and anyone able to put 2 and 2 together in such a manner as to make 4 and not 22 can easily read between the lines. Imagine the following pronouncement from the colonel in charge of strategic planning, for instance. 'What we are hoping to do is to lay out some philosophical underpinnings of a plan...to begin a journey of discovery for building a more cohesive implementation of plans and policies in the five core areas.' A fine time to be getting round to that in April 2004, Stewart seems to say. Elsewhere he notes Bremer's MBA from Harvard and it's not hard to read into what he says his exasperation at the know-all fatuity of Bremer's 7-point plans for privatisation and such like and at the ghastly gobbledegook ('best practice gaps analysis' etc) in which language seems to function not as a vehicle for thought but as a substitute for thought.

Back at the ranch Stewart was having to confront the realities of the situation. There were, he says and I believe him, some genuine successes before and independent of Gen Petraeus. The trouble was -- few if any Iraqis believed in the successes; or if they did it was not for long. Any seeds of improvement the coalition was sowing had roots too shallow to have much hope of permanence. Stewart's own despairing conclusion comes in his last sentence - however bad the native Iraqi movers and shakers might be, local loyalties always revert to one or other of these, and foreign-imposed improvements, some of them real others just speculative and hopeful, do not stand a chance in this culture. He was trying to make order out of chaos, but they preferred the chaos. He was trying to win hearts and minds, but the minds never stayed with him for long because the various men of power and influence had their own fluid and shifting agendas and alliances, and whether anyone's heart was ever with him is anyone's guess.

It stands to elementary reason that Stewart was in no way opposed to the occupation of Iraq. He went there at all because he believed that some good could come of it. As I read his account, he sees no prospect of success for it now, although he is not explicit about whether a totally different approach might have fared better. He was battling with bureaucracy, incompetence, ignorance, infighting, grandstanding and pretence from Bremer's outfit in Baghdad, opposition to his own role from his own coalition military let alone from the populace he was trying to help, and near-ludicrous ineptitude from the Italian component of such military day in and day out. He was improvising most of the time, and while he has no illusions that his snap decisions were always or even mainly right, the real truth of the matter seems to me to have been that in most cases he didn't rightly know whether he had been right or wrong, because there was no real criterion for judging of that.

The book has been put together from such notes as the author managed to take and retain, but in conditions of such pressure some of the material depends on his memory. I have no reason to suppose that any of these are unreliable, and mental honesty is shiningly apparent throughout, not least in his candour about the minor lies he felt he had better tell from time to time. Whether his own bravery was apparent to him I can't tell, but it's apparent to me. There is much quiet tongue-in-cheek humour, and the tongue comes right out of the cheek in his account of the exploits of the Italians, who were, in the homely Lancashire phrase, as much use as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking competition. His particular angle on the events is one that we don't often see recorded, let alone recorded as well as this. It does not purport to give the wider picture, but he is free of the temptation to blow his own trumpet, and I expect future historians will derive more solid benefit from Stewart than from, say, the memoirs of Gen Franks. He stayed his year's course, he had nothing more to stay for, and he leaves me wondering what the rest of them, even the admirable Gen Petraeus, can possibly hope to achieve. There were successes before and independent of him, they put down no roots, and it looks as if lasting successes will require divine intervention rather than human generalship.

An excellent read (5/6 people found this helpful)

This is a very personal account of Stewart's year in Iraq after the coalition victory. Stewart went to the Middle East looking for work and found it as Governorate Coordinator and then Deputy Governorate Coordinator of two provinces; each with its own unique challenges and differences.

He went through some fairly extraordinary experiences such as when his building was mortared and rocketed. Many of the aggressors were also people he had to face day to day on friendly terms. It's got three main themes: the leaders and their followers and the complex dynamics, interactions and challenges including apparently regular changes in police chief through assassination, fear campaigns or otherwise; the siege nature of large portions of his time in Iraq, mortaring, riots and the poor support from the Italians (he really appears not to be impressed with the Italian military); and development and how he interacted with Baghdad in this regard.

This really is a well written exciting and enjoyable story that really illustrates the perversities and complexities of life in a post-war Iraq. Today's enemies are tomorrow's friends - and vice versa.

Stewart writes with enormous detail on what he sees and feels. One feels that he is watching his own life go by with a telescope to zoom in on the minutiae of his own interactions as if they are those of a third party. He recounts levels of detail that most of us would struggle to recall in daily life because we're busy living it.

It is as if he presses 'pause' for each poignant moment, takes a detailed diary note, and then carries on. This ability to slow the pace of life isn't just evident in how he manages to capture incredible levels of detail. It's also apparent in his level headedness and ability to think very hard in a very short time before speaking: where other bright diplomats and soldiers might take the most obvious decision on a complex subject; Stewart always thinks it through before most of us have even reacted intuitively with what we would do.

His experiences are incredible. Extremely unpleasant situations such as long term mortaring, his bodyguards firing from exposed rooftops. He comes across as responding well to stress and providing a calming influence - but writes with such modesty you can't help thinking that he must have done far more than is in the book.

On the development front: this isn't a diatribe against US management, or a self-congratulatory valediction. He's very very balanced and admits to his own mistakes. But he does make clear that he was fighting an uphill battle to 'do the right thing.'

This book is completely different to 'Life In the Emerald City' which is an easier read but far less personal. That book is very racy, very blunt, littered with facts and history and only occasionally uses the first person. This book isn't racy and has a LOT of first person. You feel like you're sitting just behind Stewart's cornea for most of it.

This book is perhaps a little less poetic than Stewart's other book - there is no other main actor in this one; no dogs (well...one but never mind) for Stewart to convey emotion but it's a good book. It's more exciting and more accessible without being an Andy McNab shoot-em-up. It's also probably the first account of its kind since the end of the British Empire in the sixties.

I suspect this isn't a mass-market best seller and will appeal to very specific people. The in-and-out expats who worked in Iraq and yet learned nothing about it may resent Stewart for his candour and non-ethnocentric approach, which can come across as a bit sanctimonious or even supercilious in places. The average reader with no experience of Iraq could struggle with all of the leaders and find it a touch demanding for narrow reward.

But it should find interest in people who genuinely want to make the world a better place, including those who worked in Iraq. And it'll end up being a near-textbook for those interested in the politics of occupation or the interactions between ethnology and politics in a multicultural Muslim country. People interested in Iraq, not least of all Iraqis could well find this interesting.

A very human and engaging description of early post-war Iraq (10/11 people found this helpful)

Stewart spent just under a year in Maysan and Dhi Qar provinces between September 2003 and May 2004, as a coalition `deputy governorate coordinator', working above and alongside the local power factions. The book describes his attempts to address administrative problems from job-creation schemes to the filling of his compound swimming pool.

The book is fascinating politically, as an account of a complex local situation with three mutually unfriendly power groups, a coalition uncertain of its role post-invasion, and a set of improvised power structures. Almost none of the characters' names are recognisable outside their own country (with the possible exception of Abu Hatim, the Prince of the Marshes), or even outside their own province. Stewart successfully builds the reader's sympathies for this large cast, giving depth to the protagonists' complex loyalties and to the quirks of minor characters.

It is amazing to read, given events in Iraq today, of a time we have now completely forgotten if we ever knew it existed, when a certain amount of civilian movement in public was possible; and the coalition was welcomed in places as a partner in development and reconstruction. Amazing that the coalition frittered away precious months of goodwill as security and services gradually deteriorated, with all sorts of projects to build minority rights and even an Iraqi Olympic bid.

Stewart is fond of understated pluck, as when he decides not to allow the erection of an anti-sniper fence along one side of the compound because he prefers to preserve the river view, or when he lays on wine and opera as the team shelters from mortar attack. There is a surprising amount of comic material here, much of it darkly so. As with his first book The Places In Between, he avoids milking laughs from obviously absurd scenes, preferring to let events speak for themselves.

The book inevitably dwells in the first person singular. Stewart is clearly proud of his administrative talents. Thankfully, the events are so intense and varied, and the touch light enough, that this does not bog the book down. He is matter of fact in his descriptions of his skills, which are clearly annoyingly wide-ranging, and he does not pretend to have a clear view of anything in Iraq but his local politics. As he disarmingly suggests, others who served in Iraq will disagree with him. In fact, as someone who would not have the first idea how to respond to a peaceful but threatening attempt by one group to displace the council from the town hall I came to enjoy his wry, self-detached writer's voice. It was a bit like watching Red Adair cap an oil-well - lots of pluck, pretty messy, and rather him than me.

Anyone who is angry about what the West has done in Iraq will probably take issue with Stewart's character, which clearly draws on wellsprings of unshakeable British self-confidence. They may find smug his accounts of protracted greetings in the Arabic language. And they will find that the author has done little wrong, except to learn lessons in order to improve his performance. Would we expect different from any other political memoir?

This book is a great way to make sense of the roots of the situation which has now developed in Iraq. I recommend it to any general reader looking to dip an Iraq-fatigued toe back in to the country.

Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing in Iraq

Rory Stewart

Reader Reviews:

Before you buy this book - read this (0/0 people found this helpful)

Not the best book about Iraq (0/1 people found this helpful)

WHERE HAVE AL THE QAEDA GONE? (7/8 people found this helpful)

An excellent read (5/6 people found this helpful)

A very human and engaging description of early post-war Iraq (10/11 people found this helpful)

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