I recently picked up The Places in Between, Rory Stewart’s account of walking across Afghanistan during the start of the American war there. His new book is The Prince of the Marshes, an account of his year in Iraq. It seems as long as you are fluent in Farsi and have diplomatic experience on your resume, you can just show up in Baghdad and be made a deputy governor by the British Foreign Office. Stewart helped administer Maysan province in southern Iraq.

Slate is running excerpts of his new book. Stewart’s mind for history is matched by a drive to go, to see, and to talk to the everyday people whose identities are hidden by history books.

Friday, Oct. 10, 2003
Commentators abroad complained that the Coalition did not remember history. They believed we had ignored important lessons from post-war Germany and Japan and 1920s Iraq. But history has few unambiguous lessons. Many of my colleagues were well respected Arabists with extensive experience in post-war reconstruction, but none of them could guess the exact effect of a foreign invasion, the toppling of the President, and a society turned on its head. No library could tell you about the Prince of the Marshes; there were no polls that would reveal his popularity, now that events tested his strength. I continued to study Iraqi history; I visited neighboring governorate coordinators in four Shia provinces. But what mattered most were local details, daily encounters with men of which we knew little and of whom Iraqis knew little more.

The afternoon of my meeting with the Prince for example, I watched an elderly visitor enter the compound. He did not offer a bribe or an official letter at the gate, so he must have been known by the guard. The Iraqi police searched him and then a British sentry searched him. In exchange for a receipt he handed over his pistol. This indicated that he was not a policeman or a member of the supervisory committee. They were allowed to bring weapons into the building—loaded if they were policemen. Then he was made to sit for ten minutes on a decrepit wicker chair on the sidewalk. Some Iraqi sheikhs who were passing greeted him. It was probably embarrassing to be seen waiting in the sun, but they embraced each other warmly. The man smiled politely when a translator came out to greet him and, after a brief discussion, escorted him up the path to the reception.

Read more here.