The Weight of a Mustard Seed

by Wendell Steavenson

  The men never stopped screaming and writhing in protest: “I am innocent…We are Muslims…Please believe us…We have children and wives who depend on us, we fought for our country, we defended Iraq, God help us, please.”

  Dr. Hassan bowed his head in the retelling.

  “Thirty bullets,” he explained, “made an independent medical determination of death redundant. Their brains were spilled everywhere, their skulls were completely smashed.” For many years their blood-grimaced faces loomed destroyed in his dreams.

  Chapter 5

  YES, BUT

  DR. HASSAN HAD REPEATED THE MANTRA THAT reassured many of his generation: “What could I do?” Certain questions or memories might induce a gut twinge, but the gall of participation was generally well insulated from accountability, wrapped in layers of “What could I do?” “But I helped people, many people!” and “I suffered also, you know”; and the ultimate trumping: “You cannot understand what it is like to live under such a regime!”

  It was impossible to argue with these justifications. In Saddam’s Iraq the inculcation of fear and the (threat of) violence was very real. A misstep could kill you, imprison your wife, take your son’s university place and your daughter’s marriage prospects away.

  I met many, many Iraqis: army officers, doctors, university professors, translators, businessmen. I studied each face, listened to each story, weighed the balance of their pauses and sighs. I was mindful that my most important question, the question I had wanted to put to Dr. Hassan in Abu Dhabi, “Didn’t you know? WHY?” was never answered. Each had their own permutation of indignation, explanation, rationalization. It seemed easy enough to blame Saddam, mad monster, instead of admitting that it took thousands of individuals to enforce his will; but I knew their remonstrations were valid. It was true what they said: I could not understand what it was like to live under such a regime. I could not judge them.

  I met General Raad Hamdani in Amman in the summer of 2007. He had commanded the Second Republican Guard Corps until the fall of Baghdad in 2003. Hamdani was well read and intelligent and in conversations that ranged long over ten days of interviews, I discovered a variation on the default position of blame-shift: that of equivocation.

  Hamdani was short and bullet shaped, with sloping shoulders and grappling arms that curved around a tough compact body. His big domed head was shaved, he wore a trim dark beard and his eyes stared out under a smooth ominous eyebrowless brow and bored intensely dark. He had been a tankist and looked like a ball bearing—until he put on a delicate pair of rimless spectacles and his arms uncurled and his mouth smiled and his eyes twinkled and he began to talk and quote Churchill and Sun Tzu and Montgomery. His mind was nimble and thoughtful; he analyzed. He would think through one of my probes into morality or psychology and answer, “Yes,…but.” He employed this “Yes,…but” so frequently that when he used it, I would raise my eyebrows and smile at the old chestnut and he would smile back; it had become his catchphrase.

  Hamdani owed his bookshelf and independence of thought to the example of his father. (“An Eastern state of mind has a limited knowledge,” he told me, explaining, by contrast, the background and intellect of many of his generation of officers: “The status of learning was low, the level of thought was not high, we were an educated generation, but half our fathers were illiterate.”) Hamdani’s father had been a headmaster in Baghdad, but, in the turmoil and dizzy years of the sixties, was demoted by the Communists and then the Nationalists and then the Baathies until he was just an ordinary teacher. In 1969 he retired and recused himself from the politicization of the classroom. It was the same year Hamdani found it necessary to join the Baath Party in order to continue his studies and commission at the Military Academy. His father counseled him on the choice that wasn’t much of a choice. He told him he understood that his membership was important for his career—although he had wanted him to become an engineer like his older brother—but that he should reflect carefully on the ideology put before him and think for himself about the content of party pamphlets and meetings. Hamdani compared and contrasted and came to the conclusion that Baathism was like an Arab version of communism. It was socialist with an emphasis on Pan-Arabism, a kind of internationalist dream. “People like my father,” Hamdani observed with respectful hindsight, “knew this was impossible, a fantasy.”

  Yes, of course there were good things about the Baath Party. They focused on the eradication of illiteracy and built schools and spent money sending graduates to America and Europe to study. They tried to diversify the economy away from a dependence on oil and agriculture into state owned manufacturing. And they encouraged the advancement of women in a secular way…

  But they did not allow other ideas to surface. One ideology and one party; narrowed after Saddam’s takeover in 1979 to one man. Hamdani, as many educated Arabs often are, was contemptuous of the Arab mindset. “Arabs are not stupid, no, but our Eastern society is a society in which ideas are imposed, either on a tribal or a religious level. The Sheikh imposes or the Imam imposes. It is a society formed by a shepherd into a flock of sheep. Our first thought is not like in the West, to judge for ourselves or to assess something, our first thought should be, as we are brought up to defer, ‘What would the religious leader think?’ or ‘What will the tribal leader think?’ I owe my father for teaching me a different way: I think by myself. But that’s what the Baath Party did. Instead of a tribal leader you were given a Baathie superior. The politicians came and took the role of the tribal elder and the religious leader. Saddam Hussein was very smart. But he didn’t give others around him any chance to think. He believed he should think for everyone.”

  PERHAPS SADDAM WANTED to end the war in 1982, but Khomeini would not let go. Over the next years of campaign he harried the Iraqis, tried to cut the Baghdad-Basra road, invaded the Fao peninsula and supported the Kurdish Peshmerga fighters skirmishing in the mountains in the North. The Iraqis had air superiority and better weapons, the Iranians had greater numbers and green-headband fervor. The Iranians attacked, the Iraqis counterattacked—increasingly using poison gas as a force multiplier. Battles waxed and waned from the desert to the mountains along a 1,600 kilometer front, battles piled on top of each other, campaigns rolled over themselves, repeating, year after year, ground taken, ground lost, count the dead, count the wounded, withdraw, push forward or, more usually, stand in a trench and be shelled.

  This continued, hundreds of thousands dead, hundreds of thousands prisoners, hundreds of thousands wounded (no one knows the real numbers) for eight years. Hamdani would sit in his tank at night and read by map light. His heroes were the German Second World War tankists: Guderian, von Manstein and Rommel.

  “There is no evidence of a country benefiting from a long war.” Hamdani quoted from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. “The Iran-Iraq war was like the First World War in Europe: trenches, continuous clashes, more clashes than actual maneuvers, we repeated the Somme, and because there were many clashes there were many victories mixed in with failures and defeats.” Hamdani quoted Churchill (“a genius when it came to wisdom!”): “War is many battles and many maneuvers, but the successful general is the one who has more maneuvers than battles.”

  THE FIRST TIME Hamdani came across Kamel Sachet was in 1981 at the battle of Seif Said.

  Seif Said is a mountain on the border where Iraq’s waist narrows to Iran. It was a strategic height: from its summit plateau, 2000 meters up, it was possible to see, through a telescope, the outskirts of Baghdad 100 kilometers away. In January the Iranians attacked the Iraqi garrison entrenched on the top. It was raining and cold and the mountain was a fissured mass of bare brown crumbling rock. It was a desert, no animals, not even birds. On the lower slopes shepherds had led their flocks along the narrow sheep-worn contour tracks to graze the meager spring grass and camp in a cave called the Cave of Death. “It was grim and everyone hated it,” said Hamdani, “we lost so many soldiers there.”

  At the opening of the battle H
amdani, then a major, led an armored scout unit to discern the enemy’s position and line of communications. He found an old track to an abandoned Ottoman fort and observed the Iranians reinforcing their vanguard across a narrow pass. Then he drove to the nearest village, al-Maalla, the Iraqi staging point twenty kilometers away, to deliver his report.

  It was a wet dim gray January day. It would rain hard and then stop, rain hard again. Hamdani pulled the neck of his military sweater over his head, the rain soaked through his combat jacket. The Iranian shelling was heavy on the slopes, lighter on the outskirts of al-Maalla. In the village there was the mash of military confusion, a triage center had been set up in a surgical tent under red crescent flags; a thousand dead those first three days, maybe three thousand wounded. It was the first Iranian offensive of the war, the shelling was heavy, the mud was heavy, there was shock that the Iraqi garrison had been repulsed and there were so many wounded, shaken down the gravel roads over swollen rivulets in bloody muddy ambulances and overloaded groaning jeepfuls.

  The general in charge of the counterattacking 2nd Corps was General Latif, who Hamdani (and others) described as a courageous but bone-headed brutal man who thought that every battle should be fought as a head-on collision. Hamdani knew him from the 1974 war against the Kurds as a heavy drinker who would distribute beer to his men. (“It was permitted to drink then, but of course not on duty.”) Hamdani found his headquarters in a police station, from where two infantry brigades had been ordered up the mountain to assault the Iranians directly. Hamdani had seen the Iranian reinforcements go over the pass beneath the Ottoman fort at Joboura and he wanted to explain in his oral report that operations should be directed at choking this pass. But the atmosphere inside the headquarters was curled and mean. “Very bad.” Hamdani shook his head. A colonel and a captain and six soldiers had been accused of an unauthorized retreat and Latif had ordered their execution. The prisoners, handcuffed and blindfolded, were led outside into the yard, and a squad of soldiers were lined up in front of them. These soldiers were hesitant, cradling their guns in their hands, miserable and tense. Latif had a rifle in his hand and he screamed at the execution squad, “If you will not shoot them I will shoot you and then I will shoot them myself.”

  Hamdani could not bear to watch. He went to Sharkashi’s deputy, a wise and sympathetic officer called Barhawi, and explained his plan for cutting off the pass. Barhawi was despondent. He said to him, “Yes, you are right, but what can I do with this man? All he will do is hit them with straight-on attacks.”

  Hamdani left the scene and drove farther back behind the lines to the town of Mendali where the Iraqi staff had set up headquarters and gave his oral report about the Joboura pass to his commanding officer. A little while later he was requested to deliver his report directly to more senior commanders and directed into an underground bunker.

  He walked down a few concrete steps and inside, smelling cigar smoke in the damp concrete room. Sitting around a table was Saddam Hussein, smoking a cigar, Adnan Khairallah, Saddam’s cousin and popular Minister of Defense, the head of the Istikhbarat, the military intelligence, and a bodyguard-aide. As Hamdani came in, Saddam was scolding the head of the Istikhbarat: “This is all happening because of your failures! We did not have the correct information.” The Istikhbarat chief’s face was lifeless, it was impossible to tell if he was angry or ashamed. Adnan Khairallah was calming the situation down, saying “you win some, you lose some,” that war was not all victories—Saddam responded slowly and with sarcastic venom and continued to stare at the Istikhbarat chief.

  Hamdani proudly pulled himself to attention and gave his first report to his president. He explained his unit’s position, pointing at the map tacked up on the wall of the bunker, the enemy’s line of supply and how the Joboura pass could be cut. Saddam nodded. Adnan Khairallah nodded. Then, just as he finished, General Latif came in, wearing a military motorcycle helmet and a uniform (Hamdani noticed, slightly shocked) that was old with a frayed hem. Hamdani took the opportunity to salute and leave. He went out into another trench where an operations room had been dug out and lined with sandbags. Staff officers sat around its edges with radios, telephones, maps and radar equipment and gave him a cup of tea and pointed out topographies until he was called ten minutes later to come and have official photographs taken. Saddam, Adnan Khairallah, the lambasted Istikhbarat chief and Saddam’s bodyguard gathered together to commemorate the moment. Saddam was trying to be a little nicer to the Istikhbarat chief, perhaps regretting his earlier harshness, and called him an “old comrade,” but the Istikhbarat chief remained shocked and silent. Saddam continued talking, and ordered that the attack should be halted for a few days to allow more reinforcements to be brought up. “Let’s wait, prepare ourselves and then regain this lost ground.” General Latif, Hamdani was alarmed to notice, was unaccountably waving his Kalashnikov around, trying out different poses, and for a moment managed to point its barrel at Saddam. The bodyguard abruptly intervened, gripped the barrel of the gun and pointed it down to the ground. After the shutter click and formalities, Saddam and his entourage left by helicopter.

  So the fighting stopped for a few days and reinforcements were called. In those early months of war the Iraqi army was small and thinly stretched and the Iranians had American Cobra attack helicopters left over from the arms shipments to the Shah which devastated Iraqi armor with their rockets. The Iranians were emboldened and used the time to pull heavy guns up to the top of Seif Said and commence a distracting attack in the Kurdish mountains in the North.

  When the fighting resumed, Major Kamel Sachet’s Special Forces brigade, the heroes of Mohamara, were part of the 10,000-man assault General Latif sent, again in blunt fashion against Iranian machine guns, up the slopes. The battle continued for a month, with various offensives and skirmishes, but the Iraqi forces were unable to break through. When it was clear that the assault had failed Latif sent Kamel Sachet and a number of other commanders, under charge of dereliction, to a military tribunal in Baghdad. Hamdani’s version was that Saddam himself personally intervened in Kamel Sachet’s case, remembering his bravery at Mohamara and, impressed at how he defended his actions at Seif Said with an honest assessment, released him and a number of other officers.

  Whether this is what happened, or some approximation, is not perhaps as important as the idea of this episode as a template for the war, and for Kamel Sachet’s place in it, that followed. Seif Said was the first Iranian attack of the war, the first Iraqi defeat (the Iranians maintained a force at Seif Said until the end of the war in 1988 and when they left, they withdrew unilaterally), and the first battle in which commanders were shot for failure. Thereafter, battles were often pointlessly bloody, directed by orders that could never be questioned and the death bullet could come from in front or from behind. For Kamel Sachet and officers like him, the threat of execution was a deep imprint of fear twinned with the mercy and reprieve of Saddam. After Seif Said, Kamel Sachet would trust in his president and for a while this trust would serve his career well.

  HAMDANI AND I talked over several days in his office in Amman, where he was doing some kind of consultancy work for a rich Iraqi exile. He drew maps for me in blue ballpoint, arrows, attacks, lines of trenches, and answered his phone to take calls from various Iraqis and Iraq players who were revolving around the Baghdad-Amman-Damascus-Beirut-Washington circuit: Ayad Allawi, former Iraqi president appointed by the Americans, canvassing support for a rerun, the commander of the American marines in Anbar province who wanted advice, a cousin of the Iraqi foreign minister who wanted to talk about a new Kurdish political party—such was the exile’s coffee-tea dance of meetings. Hamdani was always very solicitous and apologized for these interruptions and would resume drawing the troop formations at the third battle of Shalamche or a diagram of the Iranian fortifications of Fish Lake and explain how the tank battles in Fao opened up the front or why Penjawin was strategic….

  The Iran-Iraq war was a long term meat gr
inder. It was also, for the Iraqis, a total war, much more so than for the Iranians, who fielded an army out of triple the population. All of Iraqi society was militarized in the national effort.

  Pupils and teachers dressed in scout uniforms every Thursday and saluted an Iraqi flag in the playground, there were veteran battalions and schoolboy battalions, even women’s battalions, and policemen were sent to the front once a year so that they might be exposed to the fight as the infantry were. An officer was respected as a brave patriot, and went to the head of the queue, Republican Guards were well paid and when they were deployed in convoy the streets were lined with children throwing water and sweets and saluting them. Even babies were dressed in the camouflage fatigues and rank of their fathers and Saddam proclaimed them “sons of our soldiers.” A former general once told me, with the boom of proud nostalgia, “We were 27 million Iraqis and 27 million soldiers.”

  And with the long war came the undertow of prolonged and hopeless fighting. Some soldiers cut their wrists or shot their feet, many relaxed in a Valium fug (the Iranians had opium to forget the pain and numb sense into courage), officers would go into battle drunk to stop themselves from shaking or “turning yellow” and some took refuge in their religion, the superstition and calming rituals of Islam warded off the horror, gave it a mysterious purpose and promised paradise.

  Hamdani did not fall in with such palliatives. He seems to have retained his own independent self. He watched the summary executions on the front lines and adjudged: yes, on the positive side it meant that a soldier would prefer to be killed by the enemy than be labeled a coward and his family receive no pension, so positions were more ruthlessly defended, but the negative aspect was that there were always more losses than was necessary—“Of course to shoot a solider was a disgusting thing, a horrendous thing, any officer trained in the right way would refuse such a thing.”