I asked him about his own experience, as commander and commanded. He replied, “It’s a very touchy subject,” and then he repeated that he had taught himself from books the British model of officer behavior and that this had always brought him trouble. “This was the pressure I felt, but I couldn’t unlearn the British way. So I went in the middle. Yes,…but.” He attempted a smile to accompany his catchphrase and drew his analysis upright again. Command at gunpoint: it meant, he explained, that the new generation of commanders would always wait for a written order before they carried out any maneuver. This hesitancy became a feature of Iraqi command, officers were afraid to take responsibility, they waited for orders, insisted on clarifying positions, telephoned the high command—“This killed the spirit of the Iraqi army,” rued Hamdani. Many, he said, chose to die a hero’s death rather than retreat tactically and be castigated as a coward. Kamel Sachet, according to Hamdani, suffered the same hesitancy. He was undoubtedly a courageous and excellent soldier, but not very well read, and not much given to debate or thoughtfulness. Hamdani believed, watching his career progress, listening to the staff officers gossip, that for Kamel Sachet, the risks of responsibility weighed as treacherously heavy as the fear of defeat.
KAMEL SACHET PUT his trust in God, his president and his own prowess. On his release from prison in 1983 he was sent to Penjawin in the Kurdish mountains, where the Iraqis held positions on the high jagged-tooth promontories. Anxious to prove himself, he would challenge his fellow officers when they went on foot to inspect high forward positions. Although he was still weak from his incarceration he always arrived first.
The following year at the battle of Fish Lake (more of a filthy canal) in the desert outside Basra, Colonel Kamel Sachet drove his jeep to the front line where the Iranians were dug in 100 meters away and the bullets fell like rain and calmly sat and asked for tea to be brewed. The battle lasted a week over Saddam’s birthday, came to be called the “Birthday Battle,” and was a happy victory. After two divisions had been thrown at the Iranian positions a tank division was deployed and the Iranians were finally pushed back across the canal, thousands drowning under fire.
Kamel Sachet was promoted in double time. He leapfrogged the staff jobs and held command positions throughout the war. Major to colonel to general. In 1987 he was promoted to the Command of the Baghdad Division of the Republican Guard and his troops stopped an Iranian attack at Shalamche which threatened Basra.
After the battle there was a medal ceremony at the Republican Palace. The ceremony was held in a great state room lined with marble and hung with giant crystal chandeliers and Saddam sat, wearing his habitual wartime green uniform, on a gilt throne at one end. TV cameras bustled at one end of the hall, party officials mingled; here there were always medal ceremonies after a battle, victory or not. By the end of his career Hamdani had fifteen medals. Kamel Sachet, as his son Ali once showed me, had 18 medals of bravery, including the Sash of Rafidain, the Sash for the Mother of All Battles and the decoration “Commander of the Two Rivers.” Medals were accompanied by cars, land and cash; model, quality, and amount dependent on rank and favor. Over the course of his career Kamel Sachet was given cash, many cars and a farm near Hilla, already planted with fruit trees. He loved to spend time among his orchards, but the cars he sold and he used the proceeds for charitable works and for building mosques.
Hamdani did not talk to Kamel Sachet on this medal occasion—they were barely acquaintances, he knew him by reputation only, but he remembers Saddam’s extravagant praise of him. “Look at General Sachet!” Saddam pronounced as he shook Kamel’s hand in congratulation. “The Iraqi soldier should be in every way like this! Look at him! Look at how fit he is! Look at his courage! Look at his good manners! Kamel Sachet is a commander I treasure.”
KAMEL SACHET’S COURAGE was hard and straight and upright. He was not a political man and had no taste for the ambitious margins of war. He did not profit from it or turn his position into currency. He was not in the artillery or ever in a staff position: he must have witnessed the poison gas attacks on Iranian positions, seen the summary execution of POWs and heard the stories of the Anfal campaign against Kurdish villages in the North, but I never heard evidence (despite due diligence and a trip to Kurdistan to talk to former Peshmerga commanders there) that he was directly involved in these atrocities.
There was a story, however, which Hamdani told, that seemed to suggest Kamel Sachet had not managed to go through the Iran-Iraq war without absorbing the military shift in morality. When the penalty of death becomes a commonplace, perhaps it becomes unremarkable to order it.
Six years after the battle of Seif Said, after which he found himself on the capital charge of dereliction, in the latter months of 1987, Kamel Sachet was Commander of the Second Division headquartered in Kirkuk. There was a battle at the mountain of Shemiran. Republican Guard reinforcements could not be spared from the fighting in Fao in the South and for two weeks Kamel Sachet ordered his men to attack uphill to dislodge the Iranians. The Iraqi attacks were repulsed, there were no reinforcements to be had, losses were heavy, artillery pummeled over the peaks from inside Iran. The Iraqi line pulled back defensively, but Kamel Sachet ordered them to continue and to break through. According to Hamdani (although I have never managed to verify this), when it was clear the assault had failed, Kamel Sachet and his senior commander Nizar Khazraji ordered the commander of a Special Forces brigade, a Colonel Jafar Sidiq, and several other officers to be executed. Colonel Jafar Sidiq got word of his arrest, fled to Baghdad and managed to get an audience with Saddam Hussein. The colonel explained the difficulties of the battle and their heroic efforts, he said that most of his men had been martyred or wounded and that it was not right to execute the heroes of the Iraqi army. Saddam ordered Kamel Sachet and Khazraji to stop the executions, but his order came too late, seven had already been shot.
Saddam had managed to draw a very neat psycho-circle for his generals, a circle, abused to abuser, like a noose.
A FEW MONTHS later, March 1988, not far from Shemiran, was the massacre of Halabja. Halabja is a Kurdish town backed up against the mountains. The Iranians and the Kurds coordinated an assault; the Kurds retook Halabja and the Iranians pushed toward the dam at Darbandikhan which, if destroyed, could flood Baghdad. On 15 March Peshmerga units captured Halabja; the next day the Iraqi high command, in retribution, frustration and genocidal anger, ordered the town bombed with poisoned gas. Families huddled in their basements from the bombardment, loaded into farm trucks to escape or ran to each other’s houses. They collapsed in the street with frothing mouths, their burning lungs drowned, lay sprawled in doorways, cradling dead children, retched in blind lines of refugees up mountain paths. No one knows how many dead, some say five thousand, lay in clumps of limp, tangled bodies with milk crusted eyes.
For many years the gassing of Halabja was confused by the Iranian offensive at the same time: the Iraqi propaganda machine blamed the Iranians for the gas attack, or claimed that there were Iranian troops in the town (there were only a few Iranian intelligence officers). Hamdani called Halabja “a political mistake,” and denied it had happened in the way the Kurds said it had. “This thing about Halabja was a lie. That everyone there was obliterated was a lie. There were some civilians left in the town, but the Iranians had occupied Halabja.” He was upset by the sentence of death that had just been passed on Sultan Hashem, the well liked and well respected (even by a former Kurdish Peshmerga commander I talked to in Sulaimaniya who had been under his command as an intelligence officer in the early eighties) head of the army at the time of Halabja. He blamed it on Kurdish revenge justice and said clearly, “An army is not responsible for political mistakes.”
Hamdani’s rebuttal of Halabja reminded me of the slippery prevarications of the Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trials…excesses, mistakes: yes,…but. I read Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich. Speer was Hitler’s favorite architect, a civilian who rose to become Minister for Armaments in
the latter years of the war. Speer was held up for many years as the Nazi who admitted collective responsibility for Nazi atrocities, who put his hands up and refused to excuse his own participation. But he categorically and continually, throughout his trial, his twenty-year imprisonment and until his death in 1981, denied that he knew about the extermination of the Jews or the extent of the slavery of the legions of forced labor that his ministry relied on for war production. In fact, in the whole of his 600-page long, extraordinary, compelling, best-selling rendition of his relationship with and attraction to Hitler I found that only two pages addressed the issue of slave labor in the armaments industry he was responsible for.
After I read Speer I read Gitta Sereny’s meticulous biography, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, in which she tried to probe the shadows behind his erudite dissembling. She wrote, “The truth, of course, is that lies are not necessarily simple,” and came to the conclusion that despite his protestations, Speer must have, in fact, known about the Final Solution. But it was something that Speer’s daughter remarked that caught my attention: “How can he admit more,” she asked Sereny, “and go on living?” After all, I thought, what person does not sustain themselves with self-myth? How would it be possible to look in the mirror without it?
Denial is a psychosomatic anesthetic. The truth, the truth about oneself, sheer and plain, is too blinding, too painful to fully realize. Locked inside our own skulls, none of us can claim perspective enough to judge ourselves clearly. But maybe, somehow, the truth does exist, like a kernel, deeper than thought and thinking, beyond the reach of rationalization, society, memory, conditioning, experience…Perhaps this kernel is sometimes called the conscience…
In the early months of 1944 Speer was hospitalized for several months. His illness, an attack of some kind of neurological exhaustion, was never satisfactorily diagnosed but Sereny, and Speer himself, although characteristically less explicitly, hypothesize that it was some kind of subconscious reaction to the stress of realizing the real horror of what the Third Reich had become.
Sometime in 1987, when he was commander of the Second Division in Kirkuk, after the battle of Shemiran and at the time of the Anfal campaigns, Kamel Sachet came to Dr. Hassan’s clinic in Baghdad complaining of chest pains. He was admitted to hospital but the medical investigation found nothing wrong with his heart. Dr. Hassan suggested that his pains might be psychological, a result of anxiety. Kamel Sachet nodded and said simply, “There are too many troubles in the North.” Dr. Hassan knew he had a complicated relationship with Nizar Khazraji, the then Chief of Staff, and that the military situation in the North was critical, but he could see that his friend did not want to talk about it further and so he did not press him.
HAMDANI SHOOK HIS head at the bullshit trial in Baghdad and all the injustice of the new Iraq (dis)order and I sat back a little. I liked him and his intelligence but Hamdani was a man who had risen unscathed through the Iran-Iraq war, who had continued his ascent through the corruption and suspicion of the nineties and who had managed to convince the Americans (in much the same way he was convincing me, with his candor and his admiration of Western mores) of his good nature and co-operation, so that although he spent several months being interrogated by army historians and CIA debriefers after the fall of Baghdad, he was never faced with Sultan Hashem’s fate.
I asked him how he had managed to steer his career through Saddam’s regime. He said that it was his forthrightness, his espousal to the “British way” that was always getting him into trouble, that he had almost been a martyr to his principle. At the end of 1990 he spoke out during a meeting of senior commanders: he said there was no point in discussing the defense of Kuwait when the only thing to be discussed was the withdrawal from Kuwait. For this heresy, he was called an American agent and a traitor, confined to barracks for two weeks and threatened with a military tribunal. His release was secured by Qusay, Saddam’s second son. He had been Qusay’s commanding officer during the Iran-Iraq war, Qusay liked him and after the retreat from Kuwait he found himself promoted rapidly under his sponsorship and protection. The nineties were the decade of sanctions and corruption and Qusay’s star, eclipsing that of his psychotic murderous brother Uday, was in the ascendant. Certainly if Hamdani had managed to hitch his fortunes to that of the favored son, it made sense that he would have done well out of it and stayed safe.
Maybe Hamdani was as good a man as he said he was. I believed Hamdani, mostly. But at the back of my mind, in every interview I ever conducted with Iraqis, was the knowledge that duplicity was as much a part of being Iraqi as excessive pride, excessive hospitality and love of the kebab. In order to thread their way through the economic detritus, the agents and the sharp-edged apparatus of the Baathie state, Iraqis developed the trick of multiple personalities. They could be belligerent or obsequious, efficient or lazy, in charge or needy, drunk or pious, according to the requirements of the official whose caprice they had to navigate. Flattering and dissembling, Iraqis had learned first to present themselves in whatever shape was convenient to the situation and second to figure out how to get their due benefit from the arrangement. Their dealings with the Americans was no different. One story for the American sergeant of the foot patrol that handed out sweets to the neighborhood kids, another for the Shia official with a bristly beard and no tie who might employ you to build part of a new ministry, another for your red-check-scarfed neighbor who wanted to blow it up. I began to understand that lying was how Iraqis had survived—those that managed to—through the vicissitudes of revolution, war and occupation, mosque and army unit, classroom and government report, promotion and arrest.
Hamdani was talking to me, a Westerner, and he knew that he must praise Western traits. Perhaps he really believed in them, perhaps not. But several times he highlighted his belief in straightforwardness and lamented that it was so disparaged in Arab cultures.
“It often got me into trouble with Saddam Hussein, this frankness!…The truth is, in our culture, frankness is disrespect.” In 1995 Hamdani had presented a paper, “Criticism on the Strategy of the Second Gulf War,” at a military forum chaired by Saddam and including 180 senior officers. As he spoke, his words echoed louder into the stunned silence that received them. The moderator tried to move the microphone away from him. “There was a silence in the room like the silence that precedes the hurricane. Saddam of course was very angry.” Saddam had stood up and brought his fist down on the table.
“Look at General Hamdani! This man is a casualty of Western ideology caused by continual reading and listening to Western media! If he was correct about his thesis, there would be no one in this room left alive today! I do not allow—” and at this he pointed his finger directly and emphatically at Hamdani.
Hamdani looked at the faces around him and saw they were all looking down into their laps, as if they didn’t want to look at a dead man.
“This decision to discuss only the bright points of anything consumed the truth,” and the truth was layered with the lies that the authority demanded. This was Hamdani’s second reproach. A year earlier Saddam had mooted a reinvasion of Kuwait; Hamdani had challenged this and Saddam had been furious.
Saddam. Saddam was the concentration of everything.
“Sometimes you would feel so close to him that you could spill your heart to him and other times you felt you were in a cage with a hungry lion.” Hamdani had thought long and hard about Saddam, his character, the contradictions and hubris, intelligence and stupidity. For Hamdani, even the mad monster deserved some yes,…but. “Saddam had strong charisma. Face to face you felt that he looked right through you to your mind and your feelings, that he knew everything about you. He was a good reader and often a good listener and other times the exact opposite and would brook no other opinion. And other times he would ramble on some trivial subject: the worst thing was his speeches! They were long with no point, they were the opposite of a tidy and analytical mind. For example, everyone knew that he would receive letters,
from Bush Senior, from John Major and Arab leaders and these letters would be five sentences long and he would reply with ten pages! He had aspects of greatness and he built the country. But then he destroyed it. He destroyed his own ambition, when he crossed a red line that he himself had drawn. In February 1980 he gave a famous speech and said that an Arab should not fight another Arab and then he became the leader of the first [sic] Arab nation to invade another Arab nation. He talked of democracy but he was a dictator. Once he heard that one of his ministers had slapped a common civilian and he called the minister and the civilian who he had slapped and ordered the civilian to slap the minister back. But then he executed many, many…
“Saddam had more than one personality. If you had Sigmund Freud and Adler and others and set them to analyze this personality I don’t think they would come to any one single theory. He was a thinker, he had a great humanitarian aspect, he was very generous and softhearted. But there was a murderous personality, very hard—the kind of hardness that would not even be taken by a beast. And he was a simple farmer, uncivilized and shackled by village ways. The difficulties of his early life and his ambitions—that went way beyond anything. At fourteen he used to dream of leading the Arab world, to be a second Saladin, that history would remember him always. He made history, yes, but there will always be a debate—”
Hamdani had tried to keep his own sense of self intact and to balance his opinions with his duty. He tried to command as fairly as he could, and to question when he could. When he could no longer question, “I tried to continue indirectly so that I wouldn’t lose the thing I had built in myself, because to lose this would mean the loss of my life.”
The Weight of a Mustard Seed Page 7
