Photos by Ashley Anklowitz
Rory Stewart talking about his experience in Iraq as the deputy governor of two regions.

On the Wednesday preceding UAF’s spring break, the Sharing Voices lecture program gave UAF students and the Fairbanks community some food for thought over the break.

Rory Stewart, a man who spent a year in Iraq as Deputy Governor of Maysan and Dhi Qar provinces in Southern Iraq, gave a lecture on state building and rebuilding in the Davis Concert Hall. Over the course of the lecture Stewart covered a broad range of topics ranging from cultural differences, tough decisions between human or civil rights and military security, and making alliances with men who hours before opened fire on him.

The lecture itself was an opportunity for the public to hear a testimony of the situation in Iraq on human terms. He explained how information restrictions can make it easy to jump to conclusions based on broad headlines in the news or military press releases.

Stewart’s purpose in the lecture was to talk about the rebuilding of a state. This, as one might speculate, is a difficult task. Stewart illustrated that “the problem [in Iraq] wasn’t that there was no plan”, contrary to a common public belief. Iraqis just “haven’t found the Machiavellian ‘prince’ to fix this society.”

However, this isn’t to say that Stewart was attempting to justify or defend all of the methods used over the course of this war. After summarizing and explaining several of the issues he personally had in governing his provinces through colorful storytelling, which he described as a series of prompts to open up the discussion between himself and the audience over the issue of state-building, the floor was opened for questions. Government contracts, dirty politics and military decisions were brought into the spotlight.

Among these was a comment claiming that the lecture was avoiding the “elephant in the room” that “this whole war was over oil.” Stewart responded by explaining that in a complex situation that involves different national interests, both commercial and military, attempting to boil it down to one issue gets us nowhere. Not only does this address the issue of the plight of armchair critics attempting to generalize the situation, but it also addresses our use of this lecture as a resource.

The question was redirected and led in the direction of other commercial issues in Iraq, including government contracts being subcontracted to local Iraqi contractors for much lower than the government appropriated funds, etc.

Rory Stewart currently has a book out covering his time in Iraq, entitled “The Prince of the Marshes.” The Sharing Voices lecture program will be bringing two more speakers over the course of this semester. One is Helen Thayer, a National Geographic Society explorer who will be giving a lecture titled “Walking the Gobi” on Friday, Apr. 25 at 7 p.m., and the other is Peter Carey, who will be giving a lecture titled “Antarctica: Tourism at the Bottom of the World” on Friday, May 2 at 7 p.m. Both will be presented in the Schaible Auditorium.