The Scot who struggled to rebuild a nation

NOT long after the first Gulf War, Norman Schwarzkopf - the burly American general who trounced Saddam Hussein's forces and then ran them out of Kuwait - was asked why he hadn't rolled his battle tanks all the way into Baghdad to get rid of Saddam once and for all. In response, the general looked pained. Those were not his orders from the UN, he said, and anyway, the idea had no appeal. "We'd have been like a dinosaur in a tar pit, " he suggested.

I couldn't help recalling Schwarzkopf 's image of a great beast struggling to extricate itself from something it doesn't understand while reading Rory Stewart's brilliant new book Occupational Hazards. In it, Stewart describes the time he spent between October 2003 and June 2004 as a "deputy governate co-ordinator" with the American-run Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq. His brief was to help reconstruct a country steeped in a political and moral swamp of corruption, religious bigotry, gangsterism, tribalism, foreign meddling and sheer incompetence.

It was Schwarzkopf 's tar pit.

A Scot - though he was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Malaysia - Stewart got the job by dint of his background. After serving as an infantry officer in the Black Watch, he joined the Foreign Office and worked in embassies in Jakarta and Yugoslavia.

Then, in 2000, he took 20 months off to go to Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal. He also worked briefly on the reconstruction of Afghanistan after the invasion.

In 2003, Stewart's posting was to the province of Maysan in eastern Iraq, run - theoretically - from the town of Amara.

About the size of Northern Ireland, this was the land of the clannish Marsh Arabs, at least 10 powerful tribes, almost all of them Shia Muslims, and most of them dedicated enemies of Saddam Hussein and his Tikritidominated regime.

Stewart's immediate boss in the CPA was a seasoned operator from the US State Department called Molly Phee. A feisty, auburn-haired, Irish-American from Chicago, she took no nonsense from anyone, and that included the CPA bureaucrats tucked away in the safety of Baghdad's Green Zone. In a book that has many harsh words for its dramatis personae, Rory Stewart has nothing but praise for the redoubtable Phee.

Together, Stewart and Phee did what they could to rebuild their corner of the stricken country, but it was tough going. Building (or rebuilding) schools, bridges, roads, sewage works, power stations, clinics and irrigation schemes while struggling to put together a council of local Iraqis was a nightmare. It meant juggling sectarian, political and tribal rivalries which could (and often did) flare into awful violence.

The only thing that seemed to unite the folk of Maysan was their hatred of the Coalition - which they never hesitated to voice.

There's no doubt that their most dangerous enemy in Maysan were the Sadrists, supporters of the Shia cleric Muqtada AlSadr, a man the Coalition were trying to marginalise and ultimately defeat. Stewart thought this was a serious mistake. "I believed it disastrous to confront the Sadrists, " he writes. "Muqtada's supporters were numerous, radical and far more powerful than we acknowledged - But the Sadrists were not yet attacking us, and I preferred to make them share in the responsibility and errors of the new council rather than allow them to criticise it from the outside." Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.

Although most of Stewart's book is taken up with his time in Maysan it reaches a terrifying (and depressing) climax after his transfer to the province of Dhi Qar and its capital Nasiriyah.

In May 2004, he was in charge of the CPA compound in Nasiriyah when it was besieged by Sadr militias. For days the compound was mortared and machinegunned while 2000 well-armed Italian troops skulked in nearby barracks, leaving the defence of the compound to a handful of British, American and Filipino "contractors" ( in other words, mercenaries).

The siege was only lifted when the Americans dispatched a helicopter gunship to take out the Iraqi mortar and machine-gun crews.

Stewart is scathing about the Italian military. "I could only conclude, after a second night of their failure to defend the compound, that the Italians were under orders not to deploy, " he writes. And when a British unit was assigned to take their place the Italians went into a huff. "Berlusconi had apparently said it was too humiliating for him to hand over the provincial capital to another country. It would be an admission that the Italians could not perform their role, in which case they would leave the Coalition." And for high-level political reasons, nobody wanted that.

The performance of the Italians might well be a metaphor for Iraq under the Coalition. Although they were the occupation's third biggest force, they had no clear idea what they were doing or what was expected of them. Silvio Berlusconi may have felt himself part of Bush's "Coalition of the Willing" but the soldiers on the ground apparently felt that the business of Iraq should be left to Iraqis. They knew in their bones that anything they did would be pointless.

Stewart hung on in Nasiriyah until the CPA handed over authority to the Iraqi government on June 28, 2004. Then came the elections of 2005 which produced, Stewart says, the kind of state the Coalition dreaded, particularly in the Shia south.

"The new state was reactionary, violent, intolerant towards women and religious minorities - The new leaders had dark histories and dubious allies; they enforced a narrow and intolerant social code and ignored the rural areas."

This is the best book by far to come out of the Iraq mess. General Schwartzkopf 's tar pit has come to pass and the dinosaur is still thrashing around trying to find a way out. Stewart's account is clearly written, never self-serving and sometimes painfully honest. But he left me haunted by the notion that we're still living with the chaos left by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, and will be for many years to come.