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BUILDING a civil society in postwar Iraq has been a mighty struggle. The infrastructure remains shattered; electricity and clean water are still in short supply. Despite efforts to infuse Iraq with political stability through elections and a constitution, the daily kidnappings, killings and insurgent attacks serve as mortal reminders that chaos reigns.

Why isn’t Iraq on better footing more than three years after America toppled Saddam Hussein? L. Paul Bremer III, former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), has already written about his difficulties bringing order to the fractured country during his 14-month tour there, a tenure frustrated by White House directives to do more with less, as well as an Iraqi leadership that Bremer complained “couldn’t organize a parade, let alone run the country.” Now two new books -- Rory Stewart’s “The Prince of the Marshes” and “Babylon by Bus” by Ray LeMoine and Jeff Neumann with Donovan Webster -- attempt to explain the CPA’s ill-fated mission and Iraq’s decline from a vantage point much closer to the ground.

“The Prince of the Marshes” and “Babylon by Bus” begin by noting that their authors were wholly unprepared for the jobs they were given by the CPA as it attempted to gear up its humanitarian and nation-building efforts. Where, one might ask, did all the qualified applicants go? Were any even sought out?

To be fair, Stewart is more capable than either LeMoine or Neumann, self-described slackers who hawked T-shirts outside Boston’s Fenway Park before turning up in Baghdad in January 2004, where they were handed volunteer jobs coordinating humanitarian aid for the CPA. But Stewart, who had served in the British Foreign Service and had recently completed a quixotic walk across Afghanistan (which became the subject of his first book, “The Places in Between”) was still out of his depth when, in October 2003, he was hired as acting governate coordinator of Maysan, one of Iraq’s poorest southern lands. “I spoke little Arabic, and had never managed a shattered, unstable, and undeveloped province of eight hundred and fifty thousand people,” he writes, adding that he suspects he was given the post, in part, because nobody else was eager to go.

Of the two books, “The Prince of the Marshes” is the more elegant and useful account of the CPA’s failures, even if it suffers at many points from an excruciating fixation on bureaucratic detail. Part of its significance comes from Stewart’s position in the CPA chain. He was high enough to knock on important doors in Baghdad, including those of Bremer’s aides, and sometimes attended meetings with Bremer himself. But he also worked on the local level in Maysan and then in another nearby province, spearheading humanitarian projects and struggling to bring together the various Iraqi leaders who would one day administer the region’s daily affairs.

Based on notes he took during his tenure, Stewart’s book is written in short diary-like chapters that often begin with bits of wisdom from the likes of Machiavelli or T.E. Lawrence and end with a pointed insight or small resolution. We quickly learn what he is faced with: a demolished infrastructure in a relatively lawless place, a disgruntled and largely unemployed population and a host of warring tribes and religious sects herded onto local governing councils in preparation for the final handover of sovereignty and democratic elections. It mattered little that Stewart was being asked to coax political dialogue among leaders who refused to acknowledge each other or were, even as they sat together, engaged in low-level hostilities just outside the council’s doors.

According to Stewart, everything seemed possible to the CPA leadership in Baghdad, which “wanted to build the new state in a single frenzy,” implementing countless programs “on human rights, the free market, feminism, federalism, and constitutional reform.” On the ground, though, Stewart found accomplishing these goals far from easy and discovered a population that wanted almost none of them.

What the people desired was the thing most in short supply: security. Kidnappings, extortions and assassinations were almost routine. And including Iraqis in the new political framework wasn’t increasing their chance for survival, as Stewart realized when the new police chief of Maysan was assassinated as he walked out of a mosque. “Every day we gambled on insufficient information, trusted and suspected, persuaded reluctant bureaucrats, threatened, rewarded, and charmed,” he explains. “[P]eople were going to be killed almost whatever we chose to do.”

Stewart’s frustration is palpable as he spends each day listening to myriad complaints, then tries to iron out differences between the opposing factions in the governing councils and quell the anger of those left out of the process. This is grueling and often thankless work, full of “formal meetings, with carefully chosen words and mutual suspicion.”

It is also fairly repetitive work, and Stewart’s narrative sometimes suffers from a certain administrative cadence. So there’s a weary relief when he must give up the reins and let the Iraqis have a go at governing.

The results aren’t pretty. The new government in the south of Iraq is “authoritarian, supported by militia, and in favor of strict Islamic social codes,” Stewart writes. “Their new state was reactionary, violent, intolerant toward women and religious minorities, and uncooperative with the Coalition.” And in December 2005, Iraqis voted for the same hard-line Islamicists again, choosing security over the promise of freedom or democracy.

“Baghdad by Bus” offers a similarly pessimistic take on the Iraq occupation and the CPA’s work there. But here, it is from the narrower viewpoint of two CPA volunteers in Baghdad charged with finding Iraqi charities able to take small lots of donated clothing and other supplies. LeMoine and Neumann crack a few jokes about how they have stumbled into this opportunity, and they expend a fair amount of ink on the head-scratching decisions made by the CPA.

But such foibles aren’t what really drive the narrative. Instead, the book focuses on the metamorphosis of two shiftless losers into somewhat thoughtful members of the human race.

The transformation is no easy throw. Whether by accident or design, LeMoine and Neumann come off early and often as two of the most unappealing characters you might meet in a war zone -- a couple of drunk, drug-addled disaster tourists who do little but get in the way and waste people’s time.

They are cocky and pushy and lack self-reflection as they trot around the coalition’s sealed Green Zone in Baghdad, describing the working journalists there as “vultures.”

Empathy is in short supply; a few pages after describing a checkpoint suicide bombing that killed 26 people as a landscape “full of things we’d, in retrospect, like not to have seen,” the two are happily toasting their newfound jobs at the CPA and wishing they “had some weed.” No wonder some journalists were initially repelled by them.

The problem with “Babylon by Bus” is that the “Bill and Ted” routine never seems to end. LeMoine and Neumann do become old hands at the aid racket, but their transformation into adults is never complete. That hinders their ability to offer much insight into the quickly deteriorating situation in Iraq. Yes, they are probably right when they say that “by completely obliterating Saddam’s Iraqi state, Bremer and the CPA planted the seeds for the shattered, sectarian Iraq of today.” But it’s hard to put too much stock in messengers who, on the very next page, are “gearing up for a party at the Hamra.”

“Babylon by Bus” isn’t without merit. When the authors focus on their personal story, the book is captivating and occasionally enlightening. At one point, the hung-over pair battle through the CPA’s red tape and deliver aid boxes to a mosque crowded with poor Iraqis. They are almost giddy with success.

Later, however, a more sober LeMoine realizes that this delivery may have worked at cross-purposes with the CPA’s goal of helping Iraq move toward a democratic future by propping up a local mosque’s religious authority. “I was inadvertently working against democracy and toward theocracy,” he notes, adding: “Of course, in the afterglow of such an exciting day, this contradiction escaped me.”

“Babylon by Bus” details the CPA’s stifling bureaucracy and the Green Zone’s darkly comic social scene, with its testosterone-fueled nights of disco dancing and brawling. Noting the dearth of women, LeMoine describes a dance floor that “resembled a third-world cockfighting ring,” adding that whenever there was trouble, “you usually only had to look to the nearest mercenary steroid meatball in the room.”

That’s entertaining stuff. But ultimately, “Babylon by Bus” fails to deliver much beyond the surface, as LeMoine and Neumann continue their casual glide through Iraq. Whether providing a few Iraqis with donated clothing or helping a drug-addicted soldier find a local pharmacist, it all seems the same to them. The soldier may have been “quickly pushing his mind over the edge with the help of a never-ending bender of pills, booze, and ‘roids; no thanks to us,” LeMoine writes. But, hey, what do they care? He “no longer needed our help -- with money, luck, and a connection or two, you could get pretty much anything you wanted in CPA-occupied Baghdad.”

Neither “The Prince of the Marshes” nor “Baghdad by Bus” will likely top the canon of literature from the Iraq war. Yet Stewart’s attempt is by far the more serious undertaking and provides a wealth of information about how the CPA struggled to shape the political process in the hinterlands. And both books serve at least one noble purpose: recording for posterity how some of the CPA’s assumptions and dictates played out on the local level, where its sometimes careless or misguided policies met an often angry and disillusioned people. Whatever the CPA’s intentions, these books leave one wondering whether the efforts to democratize Iraq have proved more disastrous to the country than doing nothing at all.

*

The Prince of the Marshes

And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq

Rory Stewart

Harcourt: 396 pp., $25

*

Babylon by Bus

Or, the True Story of Two Friends Who Gave Up Their Valuable Franchise Selling Yankees Suck T-Shirts at Fenway to Find Meaning and Adventure in Iraq, Where They Became Employed by the Occupation in Jobs for Which They Lacked Qualification and Witnessed Much That Amazed and Disturbed Them

Ray LeMoine and Jeff Neumann

With Donovan Webster

Penguin Press: 316 pp., $24.95