Rory Stewart, author of The Prince of the Marshes, describes his time as Deputy Governorate Coordinate over the Iraqi provinces of Amara and Nasariyah. In this position, Stewart met with Iraqi Sadrists of the area whose tense meetings with Stewart and stubborn dispositions set the stage for the difficult interactions that ultimately set the tone for the early years of the occupation. In both his handlings of Amara and Nasariyah, however, Stewart’s own actions are quite sloppy, with Stewart exuding too much confidence and not nearly enough tact to carry out these already complicated meetings and interactions in the most befitting manner.
The first of Stewart’s meetings, took place in Amara, a town where most of the secular middle class—who held aspirations of living in a peaceful liberal democracy—had fled, was brought about by a large, spur-of-the-moment, demonstration in front of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) compound. Stewart invited representatives of the protesters into his office to speak on the concerns of the people. This was merely a façade though, as Stewart took no mind to the list of grievances they prepared for him. He continuously interrupted the men, and aggressively cut off the representative’s objections with comebacks of his own, before giving up and angrily showing them the door.
Stewart’s other botched meeting was in Nasariyah, where the provincial council was adamantly opposed to the Coalition. This time, three thousand Sadrists had assembled around the CPA compound. Looking for Stewart, Jawad and Sheikh Muwayad, two representatives of the protestors, risked arrest as they entered the compound to present Stewart with another outlined list of their grievances. During their recitation of the preamble of these grievances, Stewart cut them off and urged them to get to the point. Once they did make their points, however, Stewart exhibited no real effort to understand them, and spent little time trying to explain his own position. As a result of the discontent Jawad and sheikh Muwayad felt after their meeting with Stewart, the two planned and carried out a series of terrorist attacks throughout the country.
It is extremely clear that Stewart mistreated these people. Yes, there was a large degree of resistance, and the people were hard to negotiate with, as their goals were pretty opposite to Stewart’s, but still, Stewart could have handled these dealings in a much more appropriate manner. These people were disempowered, disenfranchised, frustrated, and militarily mobilized for action, and Stewart, regardless of all these factors, treated them inappropriately. He could have leveled with them—he could have dropped his façade of superiority and come off his high horse to speak with them on a more respectful and befitting level. While many of the requests of the people he was working with were not probable or realistic, Stewart could have still given them more patience and attention. The delicacy of the situation was, even at this point, very obvious, and Stewart failed to take the rising tensions into account in his dealings with his subordinates. Rather than shooting down these people, he should have used this time as an opportunity to show them the kindness of the foreign forces and to teach trust and cooperation. Stewart realizes this, albeit a little too late, saying, “I should have seen it more from their perspective. They had walked into a coalition base—taking the risk of being arrested…I had not allowed them to read out the manifesto they had written with such care. And now, I insisted on knowing what they wanted,” (Stewart 321). This situation can easily be looked at as Stewart failing to realize a rare and crucial opportunity to enhance the image of the occupying foreign forces in the eyes of the Iraqi citizens.
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