The Weight of a Mustard Seed

by Wendell Steavenson

  The unit gathered in the desert. He could see the lights from a town some way off, but there was little traffic on a nearby road. The Lieutenant opened the envelope containing his orders, it was a handwritten note with no official stamps or signatures (for plausible deniability) and it commanded the unit to take control of their area, capture any passers by, avoid shooting and wait for one hour before they turned on their radios.

  There was nothing in the vicinity but a few shepherds, these they duly captured. When the Lieutenant finally made radio contact they were ordered to proceed south to support the Republican Guards in their capture of Kuwait City.

  Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait was a classic Bedu desert raid. After the war with Iran, Iraq was crippled with debt, a big chunk of it, upward of $10 billion, owed to Kuwait, who together with the Saudis and the Americans had pumped money to Saddam as long as he was fighting Khomeini’s Shia revolution. Saddam had hoped to raise money by getting some kind of discount on the debt and by cashing in on rising oil prices, but Kuwait’s Emir proved recalcitrant on debt negotiation, upped Kuwait’s oil production, which depressed oil prices, and ignored Iraqi complaints about Kuwaiti slant drilling under the border that tapped southern Iraqi oil fields. Originally Saddam had discussed a limited incursion into Kuwait, but the few generals that he confided in did not dare to try to temper his ambition or his hubris. Saddam was goaded by Kuwaiti arrogance and encouraged by the apparent uninterest of the Americans, confirmed, for him, during his meeting with their ambassador April Glaspie. History—and people’s lives—are so often reduced to the whim of a bully and some stupid bit of crossed-purpose misunderstanding.

  IN THE COOL desert night, the soldiers listened to their orders and looked around at each other in conspiratorial astonishment.

  “Are you sure?” Mohammed asked his Lieutenant. “It’s Kuwait, really? Not Kut?”

  One of the soldiers laughed. “It’s Saddam’s gift! He wants to make it up to us, after the war with Iran when we never left the country! He wants to send us on a trip!”

  No one was very worried: the Kuwaitis would run away, they were known as bad fighters, they were not the Iranians, after all…

  They were right about the Kuwaiti army. It did not fight much. Kuwait City was taken by surprise. The palace was surrounded, the Emir fled with his family to Saudi Arabia in a convoy of SUVs. There were small firefights by night guards and alarmed traffic police, the Minister of Sport came out onto the street brandishing a sword and was shot dead, Kuwaiti army barracks and arsenals were seized and raided. By the morning the vanguard of Iraqi paratroopers, Special Forces and armored columns that had driven down from Basra were manning checkpoints, some wearing stolen Kuwaiti uniforms, and arresting anyone driving to work in a car with official plates.

  The Iraqis looked at the rich fat Kuwaitis with their huge American cars and their fancy newfangled car phones and laser discs and microwave ovens and their supermarkets stuffed with frozen pizza and Argentine beef and mangoes from India and spat with disrespect. They did not deserve their country (which in any case was a historical province of Iraq) if they did not defend it. The Kuwaitis looked at the Iraqis as rough frightening cousins and stayed indoors. An order was given that officials, police and workers should return to their offices and factories, those that continued to sit at home—particularly policemen—were rounded up as resistance.

  The surprise invasion shocked the world. Under a UN resolution, the United States organized a coalition of more than thirty countries to liberate the emirate. Television news went 24-hour with pictures of terrified Western families held hostage in Iraq, SCUD missile attacks in Israel, smart bombs hitting the cross hairs of the targets and reports of Iraqi atrocities—some real, some, like the famous story of Iraqi soldiers tossing babies out of incubators, sheer Kuwaiti fabrication. Under the weight of outrage, Saddam, so recently an American ally, was demonized. Saddam had overreached and now his hand was stuck in the cookie jar and there was nowhere to maneuver.

  Saddam postured, declaimed, proclaimed, and installed a triumvirate, his half brother Sabawi, his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid and Aziz Salih Numan, to govern Kuwait as the 19th Province of Iraq. Tanks and infantry were deployed and entrenched in the desert. He sent Kamel Sachet to command the Special Forces in charge of the security and defense of Kuwait City. Kamel Sachet’s deputy was General Barakh Haj Hunta, a close friend of his, a man all Kurds remembered for his helicopter from which he had inspected Anfal operations and thrown captured Peshmerga.

  Sgt. Mohammed had no great opinion of General Kamel Sachet; once he told me, “He was just like the others.” A hard instrument of the regime, simultaneously cowed and exalted by his position and concerned with the politics of reports and the whispers in Saddam’s inner court. He did not think he was a particularly bad man—Barakh had the more ruthless reputation—but he considered Kamel Sachet just another one of them. There were plenty among the ranks who derided the Kuwaitis for their softness and assumed the propaganda that Kuwait was a left-over part of Iraq for the taking, but there were plenty too who felt uncomfortable about the whole invasion. Sgt. Mohammed could not know, for example, that when Kamel Sachet had heard ( fait accompli on the television like everyone else) of the invasion of Kuwait he had turned to his wife and said, “This is mad; he has created a disaster that will destroy us all.” Disquiet, in an army ordered by discipline, is undisclosed.

  IT WAS THIS disquiet that I was searching for, these flickers of conscience. This army, as instrument of the regime, did monstrous things but it was made up of ordinary men who did not seem monsters to me nor that abstracted and overwrought Hollywood word, “evil.”

  Some time into my investigations I read Philip Zimbardo and then I read Stanley Milgram and then Hannah Arendt, Albert Speer, Gitta Sereny, Primo Levi (again). These were psychologists and writers who had tried to address the well-springs of evil in the aftermath of the ash and the final reductive horror of the Nazi concentration camps in the Second World War. Man’s inhumanity to man. WHY? How do ordinary little human cogs make up a torture machine?

  Philip Zimbardo was a young psychology professor at Stanford University in 1971 who devised an experiment to test the psychological results of incarceration. He wanted to understand what happened to prisoners when they were locked up. Little did he expect that the more interesting results would be the psychological effects of prison on the guards.

  He set up a mock prison: corridor, cells, punishment closet, shower block, in one end of Stanford’s Department of Psychology. He advertised for volunteers for a social experiment and weeded out applicants he thought were somehow unstable or smoked too much dope (it was California in the hippie age) and separated, by random lot, the eighteen young men into prisoners and guards. He noted, with some amusement, that in that era of youthful anti-establishment rage, no one really wanted to be the guards.

  He gave the prisoners numbers and dressed them in a kind of short tunic with no underwear permitted. The guards were kitted out in crisp military style uniforms, handcuffs, whistles, truncheons and mirrored sunglasses. He separated the guards into three eight hour shifts and told them it was their responsibility to create “a psychological atmosphere that would capture some of the essential features characteristic of many prisons,” although they were not permitted to physically harm the prisoners.

  Zimbardo had planned for the experiment to last two weeks. But he was forced to call a halt to it after six days; the guards had begun to physically, verbally and sexually demean the prisoners to such an extent that two prisoners had already broken down and had to be removed. Zimbardo’s girlfriend at the time (later his wife), a psychology Ph.D. student who was not involved in the experiment, walked in one evening and saw a line of shackled, hooded prisoners being led down the corridor for their toilet break. She felt chilled and sickened at the sight and she confronted Zimbardo about her misgivings. He said she was letting her emotions get in the way of the research, but she would not back down. Finally
he agreed to suspend the experiment the following day. She had told him what he previously, caught up in the unfolding drama and the logistics of organizing it all, had not noticed: “What you are doing to those boys is a terrible thing!”

  The “guards” never hit the “prisoners” but they used every other trick of intimidation they could, at their worst they became caricatures of the nasty POW commandant, the sadistic Southern warden, the mocking sarcastic jackboot. Prisoners were made to sing their numbers during roll call, if they were out of tune they were forced to do push-ups: ten, then twenty, then an indefinite number until the guards told them to stop. Pointless chores were invented, such as picking burrs out of blankets or polishing boots or remaking already perfectly hospital-cornered beds. Orders were barked, sticks brandished, prisoners singled out for ridicule, stripped, confined to the punishment closet for increasing amounts of time, left naked all night or chained to a bed. On the final evening prisoners were lined up for roll call and ordered to “hump the camel,” by simulating sodomy with a prisoner bent over in front of him.

  The shock of the experiment was how quickly and completely the arbitrarily assigned roles had transformed the volunteers into brutalizing enforcers and cowering inmates. Of course, as Zimbardo observed, not all the guards were equally aggressive and not all the prisoners equally passive. There were plenty of degrees and incidents, power plays, reactions, countermeasures—but ultimately, there was no defiance. Neither the guards who (as some admitted afterward) were uneasy about the humiliating punishments meted out, nor the prisoners who suffered them, ever asked to quit.

  Zimbardo noted that among the guards there were roughly three different categories. There were the leaders who invented the routine and the punishments and grew into their roles, devising more ingenious ways of breaking the prisoners down. There were the followers who seemed to look up to these leaders, reinforce their actions and curry favor. And then there were the guards who did not like to participate in the excesses. Those in the third category never spoke out or stepped in to counter the authority of the other guards; instead they often absented themselves, found something else to do. In their dealings with the prisoners they were fair and reasonable and sometimes, when the other guards weren’t looking, friendly and helpful; they let them cadge a cigarette or an extra few minutes in the shower.

  SGT. MOHAMMED WAS deployed on the streets of Kuwait City in a mobile unit overseeing checkpoints. He saw the gangs of Baathie cohorts strip factories of plant, libraries of books, ministries of computers. Kuwaitis were forced at point of gun or threat of kidnap to “sell” their house or the contents of their warehouse or their cars. “Of course we were under orders to shoot looters,” he said with a rueful smile, but the thieves often carried laissez-faire documents signed by Uday, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop them. As America and her allies massed in Saudi Arabia, the pillaging peaked nefariously and insecurity among the ordinary Iraqi soldiers, moral and physical, grew. “The human side was the most difficult,” Sgt. Mohammed recalled, “the animosity from the Kuwaitis, cursing looks. If you went into a store for a sandwich people would avoid you.” He said he believed Saddam had appointed Kamel Sachet and Barakh, tough fighting men of solid reputation, to lift morale.

  Part of Sgt. Mohammed’s job was to provide support for Istikhbarat (military intelligence) units who were hunting resistance cells. Informers, 3 a.m. raids, radio transmitters and networks of Kuwaiti policemen. One night his unit stopped two Kuwaitis out driving well after curfew. The Kuwaitis were distraught and said that soldiers had come into their house, smashed the place up and raped their Philippino housekeeper. Sgt. Mohammed went to the scene and verified the smashed cupboards, woke up the sergeant at the nearest checkpoint and made him account for his soldiers, toured other checkpoints in the area and asked if there had been any patrols. The Istikhbarat interviewed the Philippino housekeeper, but when she was brought to make an identification from the soldiers who were on duty in her area that night, she was frightened and refused to point anyone out. But still several Iraqi sergeants were imprisoned for two days for negligence and their soldiers lashed.

  One night Sgt. Mohammed accompanied a lieutenant (a decent officer he respected) escorting a military driver caught AWOL to the Istikhbarat headquarters that had the name, Orwellian enough, The Department of Investigations and Following Up. When they arrived, the lieutenant and Sgt. Mohammed brought the driver into an interrogation room; as Sgt. Mohammed understood it, the lieutenant wanted to scare the AWOL driver into talking. In the interrogation room an infamous Istikhbarat captain was at work. A Kuwaiti man was tied up naked and blindfolded on the floor. One of his legs was broken and in a plaster cast. The captain’s “executioners,” as Sgt. Mohammed called his assistants, were beating his other leg with sticks. This was much harsher than Mohammed had ever seen before; it seemed to be of a different level of cruelty, deliberate and unlimited. The tortured Kuwaiti was screaming, “For the sake of Saddam leave me alone!” The captain called over a soldier whose name happened to be Saddam and taunted him, “You wanted someone called Saddam! Here is Saddam! You will talk now! God is in heaven and he’s not coming to help you!”

  “For the sake of Mohammed!”

  The captain called a soldier whose name was Mohammed.

  “You wanted Mohammed? Here’s Mohammed! Say it, now! Tell it, now! Say it!” He put a gun to the Kuwaiti’s head, close to his ear so that the click of the released safety was magnified. He gave him an empty bottle and told him to hold it and then screamed back at him, “I’m going to shove this up your ass!”

  “It was a horror film, they were cannibalistic, they were zombies.” The captain’s eyes were dead and crazed. “They were like animals gathering around a piece of prey.”

  The decent lieutenant touched Sgt. Mohammed’s shoulder and said quietly, “Let’s leave.”

  But the captain had noticed their arrival and jerked his head at their cowering AWOL driver and ordered, “Bring him over.” At this the driver fainted. The lieutenant stepped over him and put his body between his prisoner’s and the captain’s.

  “I’ll get you the full story,” the captain told him.

  “I brought him just to let him see—he is not yet formally charged—”

  As the lieutenant remonstrated with the captain, Sgt. Mohammed and the driver were led away by one of the “executioners” into a farther hall. In this hall there were many prisoners, tied and chained. Some were handcuffed to metal hooks in the wall, others, Sgt. Mohammed saw, with bowel clenching horror, were nailed by their ears to wooden planks.

  ONE NIGHT SGT. MOHAMMED was with a unit of Istikhbarat when they arrested several members of a family in one house as part of a resistance network. The youngest son was only eighteen years old and had been apprenticed to the police for just two weeks, with no official position except a leftover ID card. He was a weak skinny kid called Abdullah and when they arrested him he stammered and became hysterical. The arresting Istikhbarat officer slapped him and dragged him past his aunts who were pleading, “He’s too young!” An Istikhbarat corporal raised his hand as if to hit the wailing women who were thrusting a Koran at Abdullah to cure his hysteria, instead he caught one of them by the forearm, twisting his body, rubbing himself against her. There was nothing Sgt. Mohammed could do but accept the pair of shoes one of the women gave him for Abdullah as they pushed him into the car, handcuffed, and forced his head between his knees.

  They took Abdullah and the other relatives to the prison on the base; it had been built by the Americans and was of a modern design with electric sliding doors. The supervising guard checked the new prisoners in and told them they could choose a mattress, a blanket or a pillow. Sgt. Mohammed had taken pity on Abdullah, who was still shaking, but at least was no longer barefoot, and managed to get him all three, as well as bringing him a bowl of yogurt and some tea, and to leave him a few cigarettes and a box of forbidden matches. Later he badgered his decent lieutenant into interrogating
Abdullah himself, so that he would not get beaten for stammering.

  Sgt. Mohammed was Zimbardo’s third category of guard.

  “When it was possible I would help, when I could avoid the problems.”

  One night he found himself alone on the street. He was heading back to the barracks to persuade his quartermaster friend to issue him with a box of extra bullets. It was December or January; the Americans were bombing. A couple of the soldiers in his platoon had shot off their rifles under cover of the bombardment to test the barrels—firing without orders was forbidden—and it was to replace these spent bullets that he had gone back to get a new box. On his return, not far up the road from the Istikhbarat office, he saw a Kuwaiti sitting in a car. Just sitting in his car, alone, looking in his rear-view mirror as if he was watching the entrance. Mohammed came up from the other side unobserved, opened the car door and pointed his gun at him.

  The Kuwaiti put his hands in the air. “I am waiting for my wife,” he tried to explain.

  “Which house is she in?”

  The man pointed, but the house he pointed at was dark and looked shut up and empty. Mohammed shook his head at the man’s story. “I will have to take you in for questioning.”