Bounding into the lobby, Rory Stewart could be a member of the upper fifth let off games so that Aunt Maude can treat him to a cream tea at the local hotel. This particular public school boy, one suspects, is not quite ready to be made a prefect, yet aged 29¾ he was left in charge of one hell of a big playground: Iraq. Well, a large chunk of it, containing 850,000 marsh Arabs, all answerable to him.
Judging by the photograph depicting Stewart in tribal dress on the dust jacket of Occupational Hazards, his account of his time in Iraq, he clearly sees himself as more Lawrence of Arabia than Tucker of Grange Hill. Arabia has seduced him, as it has so many of his background: Eton, Oxford, Black Watch, Foreign Office. Where this diplomat differs from crustier colleagues is in his willingness to be decidedly undiplomatic — offering an insider’s account of our comically disastrous attempts to civilise Iraq.
He arrived in southern Iraq in the autumn of 2003, six months after the invasion, and spent more than a year as local governor, overseeing the local “rebuilding” of the community. The dissonance between the aspirations of his bosses in Baghdad and the situation on the ground is staggering. When he could not even leave his compound as it was under siege from mortar attack, he was sent memos ordering him to set up “gender awareness workshops” in remote marshland villages. Vacuum-packed $1m “bricks” arrived so fast that he ran out of ideas about how to spend them. While his region drowned in blood, he was drowning in memos laden with “David Brent jargon” or ordering him to seek out three rival glaziers to gain quotes to replace a window.
These snapshots, trivial in themselves, lead you remorselessly to Stewart’s bigger picture: that turning the marshlands of Iraq into a greater Islington was never a goer.
Although Stewart grew disillusioned with a war that he supported, he has warnings for liberals, too: you just have to accept, he says, that Iraqis will brutalise each other. We would have been better off, he insists, bribing Saddam Hussein with $10 billion to be a good boy: “Iraq has cost $450 billion, that is $2,000 for every man, woman and child in America. Would it have been so evil to keep Saddam?”
More mischievously still, he argues that once we were in we should have listened to Donald Rumsfeld and got straight out again. The ditching of Colin Powell’s celebrated post-invasion strategy is blamed for the chaos, but Stewart disagrees. “I saw the State Department plan and it was not great,” he discloses. “It was couched in such general terms. It said, ‘if looting occurs you should try to stop it’, but it did not say, ‘there will be catastrophic looting in Baghdad and it will take 1m troops to prevent it’.”
Contrary to received wisdom, the problem was not lack of plans; sometimes there seemed too many. There were PowerPoint presentations about setting up a stock exchange, even protracted wrangling over the wording of a clause in the new constitution guaranteeing asylum to those fleeing persecution. “As if anyone would seek asylum in Iraq,” he shakes a rueful head.
The only strategy was denial: nobody could admit that anarchy reigned because it would be an admission that the invasion had been a fiasco. Such was the chaos that Stewart was supposed to control, running first Maysan — the size of Northern Ireland — and later Dhi Qar. The son of a diplomat, he left the Foreign Office in 2000 to spend two years trekking 6,000 miles across Afghanistan and its neighbours, prompting him to write a well received travelogue, The Places In Betweeen. But bright and energetic though he is, did such experience justify making him a potentate? “I had stayed in 500 village houses (on his walk), so I had a real affection for such societies. People weren’t worried about my age: they were worried I was a foreigner.”
Stewart might dress like something out of a Savile Row catalogue — a sort of Lawrence of Belgravia — but his sympathy seems to be with Iraqis more than the West. He recalls the ceremony marking his departure from Iraq, saying goodbye to a friendly warlord. “He said, ‘We shall miss you, Mr Rory’. I said, ‘But you have spent the last week trying to kill me’. He said, ‘It’s nothing personal’.” Far from loathing such foes, he says softly: “I loved him. Sadly he has been killed since.”
Stewart now lives in Afghanistan running a charity. He would like to return to Iraq but says dryly: “Unfortunately, a lot of people would be very enthusiastic about killing me.”
He laughs at blimpish British officers who refused to deal with a local warlord on the grounds that he was corrupt or ill-educated. For, as Stewart points out, in rural Iraq there simply is no nice middle class that organises wine and cheese evenings from which potential politicos could be drawn: “The question you should ask is not is this person corrupt, but how much power does he have?” What is Stewart’s manifesto: let sleeping dictators lie? “I am a great believer in grasping the limitations of our power.”
Provocatively, he contends that publication of photographs depicting American torture in Abu Ghraib provoked less flak than you would imagine. “That is what Iraqis expected. They kept saying, ‘Why are you wimps?’ and ‘You need to lock people up without trial, bring back a secret police and curfews’. But it is very difficult for a western government to sanction that.”
Instead, we did the reverse: “We had British policemen coming out talking about how we had to transform the police from a force into a service. Long-term it is admirable, but doesn’t help with the immediate problem of car-jacking.”
Stewart insists that in Iraq we could have moved the exiled leadership into place far sooner. Still, he is surely right that we were hopelessly unrealistic expecting to make this godforsaken land Eden once more. In his region, a militia killed a woman for wearing jeans and smashed internet cafes and indeed just about anything not out of the Dark Ages.
And this group received 85% of the vote. The coalition forces refused to accept the result and called a new election, in which these charmers gained 90% of the vote. “This is a very unpleasant group, let us not pretend otherwise, but it was a relatively free election and if you believe in democracy you have to accept the result.”
Did the commanders realise that they were losing the “peace”? “They could not agree that Baghdad had descended into anarchy because that would have made a mockery of what they were trying to achieve. When I tried to make this point they said I had been in the field too long or I was reactionary.”
Which, to some extent, he is. Yet where Stewart is surely right is that if you really object to human rights abuses, you need strategies and rules to stamp them out. So if you really have a problem with women being stoned to death for wearing jeans, are you going to arrest the local leaders who ordered it? If so, you are back in the business of colonialism. If, by contrast, our leaders just issue verbal condemnations, you are merely engaged in moral preening.
Meanwhile, our soldiers continue to kill and to be killed. “We are,” says Stewart, “frivolous, dilettantes, amateurs.” Which is forgivable in the upper fifth, but not in the White House or Downing Street.
Occupational Hazards, by Rory Stewart, is published by Picador
