Iraq war a ‘geopolitical disaster’

The triple car-bombing that rocked the southern Iraqi city of Amara last week, killing 30 people, proved a sad reminder of the ongoing volatility of the situation in Iraq five years into George W. Bush’s misbegotten war.

Despite recent progress in the overall security situation in Iraq, the attack jarred residents of a less violent area of the country. It suggested that the recent British Hanover to local Iraqi authorities may enflame another region. But it would not have surprised Roy Stewart.

Toward the end of “The Prince of the Marshes,” his remarkable book on his experiences as governor of southern Mayan province after the war, British diplomat Stewart describes his astonishment upon watching a DVD made by insurgent Shi fighters on their attack on a “coalition” compound in the province.

The recruiting film featured religious sermons and pictures of Sadist militants, Kalashnikovs held high, besieging the compound where Stewart and his thin military protection force had been under attack just weeks before.

What was astonishing to the brave young British official? “Few of the militants made any attempt to cover their faces and I recognized many of the people who had come to my office” in previous weeks to sip tea, request help, discuss politics.

A while later, as he prepared to leave Iraq, Stewart is assured by a leader of the attack that his efforts at reconstruction and reconciliation were much appreciated by local Iraqis and he will be missed. “We wish you could stay. You are our hero.”

“What are you talking about, Sad,” Stewart said. “Why were you firing mortars and trying to kill me five weeks ago?”

“Ah, Seya Roy,” he replied with a grin, “that was nothing personal.”

Stewart’s 2006 book, “The Prince of the Marshes,” is hands down the single most compelling explanation of the complexity of Iraq internally. Not having read the book before last year’s column on the most authoritative books to understand how the U.S. got entangled in Iraq, I want to update the record.

The book (available in paperback) is a colorful account of Stewart’s year as governor in Amara and Nasiriyah in the south of Iraq. Despite his courage and commitment to rebuild civil society in Iraq, Stewart explains how the bitter divisions and factions even in the predominantly anti-Saddam south of Iraq undermined efforts to build schools, restore utilities and find political compromises among local tribes, pro-Iranian groups and local warlords.

Few can touch Stewart’s richly etched encounters with the deep divisions within Iraq that were unappreciated, and ignored, in the rush to war.

Stewart, who also wrote a vivid account of his walk across Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban (“The Places in Between”), recently published an essay on earlier books on Iraq in The New York Review of Books, Oct. 25.

The article covered works on Gertrude Bell, the daring British civil servant who helped create a country called Iraq out of diverse Arab and Kurdish fiefdoms in Mesopotamia. I have read only “Queen of the Desert,” by Judith Wallach, but would recommend it as an informative addition to my favorite book on the Middle East, “A Peace to End All Peace,” by David Fromkin.

Three other 2006 and 2007 books I read in recent months also deserve mention in the context of the war in Iraq and U.S. foreign policy. They are Zbigniew Brzezinski’s “Second Chance,” Ron Suskind’s “The One Percent Doctrine” and Ali Ansari’s “Confronting Iran.”

Suskind’s book is the best “inside” account of the mindset in the Bush-Cheney administration as it conducts its “war on terror.” Most revealingly, it documents the way in which the vice-president and his staff eviscerated the interagency process on intelligence and decision-making to allow Bush “to rely on impulse and improvisation to a degree that was without precedent for a modern president.”

Ansari, an Iranian-American scholar, ably describes the antipathy and misunderstandings that have characterized U.S.-Iran relations for decades, and the risks of a military collision.

Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security adviser and one of the most articulate of the foreign policy “realists,” analyzes the successes and failures of the last three presidents. He gives passing grades to the first President Bush, especially for dealing with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and to President Clinton, for his efforts in the Middle East and the Balkans. His verdict on the current president is “catastrophic,” noting how “a personal peeve,” vague facts and neo-con unilateralism turned a golden opportunity for world-wide support after 9-11 into “calamitous damage to America’s global standing.”

The war in Iraq, Brzezinski writes, has been “a geopolitical disaster” diverting important resources from rebuilding Afghanistan, increased terrorism, and worst of all, undermined American legitimacy and global leadership role elevated by peaceful victory in the Cold War. In a theme that is a major part of the Suskind book, Brzezinski compares Bush and Cheney’s lack of strategic vision with the calm demeanor of former presidents who faced the threat of nuclear war from another superpower. “American leaders did not propagate fear as a means of sustaining national determination (it is hard to imagine Eisenhower or Reagan proclaiming himself a war president), and they patiently balanced strategic firmness with diplomatic flexibility.”

Fred Hill of Arrowsic was a foreign correspondent for The Baltimore Sun and worked on national security issues on Capitol Hill and in the State Department.