The Weight of a Mustard Seed

by Wendell Steavenson

  The Kuwaiti became alarmed and started to beg him not to hurt him.

  Mohammed looked about him to see if anyone was around, and when he was sure there was no one, he shut the car door and waved at the man to go.

  “Yes, he was probably a spy,” Mohammed told me.

  “Why did you let him go?” Now I was Zimbardo.

  “Because the Kuwaiti resistance were too weak, they weren’t much of a threat, and I didn’t want to harm him.”

  “But he was your enemy.”

  Mohammed shrugged. “It was his right to defend his country.”

  “But you let him go, it was against your orders and your duty—”

  “After what I had seen in the Department of Investigations, I didn’t have any good faith in the legitimacy of the occupation. After I had seen them raid Kuwaiti families and detain people…I knew arbitrary arrest from Iraq, perhaps I wanted to limit the spread of this disease.”

  “Did you feel good afterwards, having let him go?”

  “I was relieved. I felt as if I had saved my soul and done something my family could be proud of.”

  But he never told anyone he had let a spy go, not even his family.

  In Baghdad in 2004 we used to observe cynically that American helmets were the same shape as Wehrmacht helmets; it is bland axiom that all occupying armies end up behaving the same way: aggressively and badly. This is the empiricism at the heart of Zimbardo’s experiment: a certain environment creates a certain response. But Zimbardo also wrote that he could never have predicted which volunteers would have turned out to be abusive in power or who timidly erred toward compassion. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with obvious qualities like personality or confidence or height. I don’t know if we should forgive the “leaders” or the “followers,” the captains or their executioners, or the angel-demon Raeds, but the onion peeled, these layers of anecdote and happenstance and incident, at least to me, began to reveal an understanding of them.

  KAMEL SACHET HAD no jurisdiction over the Istikhbarat and their enthusiasms, but he made it very clear to his soldiers that he would not tolerate looting or violence against civilians and that transgressors under his command would be shot. There was a case of a Lebanese woman married to a Kuwaiti who claimed she had been raped by an officer of the Special Forces. Because the lieutenant in question was Special Forces the investigation was carried out by his regiment. There was mitigating confusion: the lieutenant it seemed had in fact been having an affair with the Lebanese woman while her husband used the connection to get stolen cars through checkpoints. Kamel Sachet was unmoved by the details. He told the disgraced lieutenant, “The Iraqi position and reputation is now under a spotlight, what you did could trigger a crisis; we will not tolerate looting or rape and anyone involved is a traitor and should be executed.”

  Sgt. Mohammed happened to be on base when the lieutenant was executed.

  Two lines of ten men were drawn up on the parade ground. One was the firing squad, the other witnesses, each man drawn from a different Special Forces unit. General Kamel Sachet and General Barakh stood on a small concrete platform, overseeing the event. They wore camouflage uniforms and red berets and had pistols at their hips. The lieutenant was tied to the basket of the ladder of a fire truck and the ladder was raised up high. Kamel Sachet repeated the formal judgment of the tribunal and asked the Lebanese woman if she wished to recant her story. Sgt. Mohammed noticed that she was wearing a blouse that showed her cleavage and that she was heavily made-up. She shook her bare head of hennaed hair. The execution squad then raised their guns to their shoulders, elevated the barrels and shot the lieutenant tied above them.

  At the sound of the volley the Lebanese woman began screaming. Kamel Sachet stepped off the podium and went up to her and slapped her hard across the face. He was furious. “Do you think we do these things cheaply?” he demanded of her. “Why are you screaming now?” The Lebanese woman slumped sobbing, the body of the Lieutenant was winched down and a mercy shot delivered to his forehead, although it was clear he was already dead. The Lebanese woman said she didn’t think they would shoot him like that—Kamel Sachet hit her again in disgust. “We knew he was innocent, but your allegation became public—this is your doing!”

  There were others who were hauled aloft on cranes and shot. A colonel who was smuggling gold out of Kuwait in a coffin was executed and his body left pinioned in the sky for a week.

  SADDAM DECRIED RETREAT or negotiation. Kamel Sachet organized the defense of Kuwait City as he was ordered. But the reality and the rhetoric disconnected. Two weeks before the Americans and allies initiated their ground attack, Kamel Sachet lost a whole battalion from Kuwait City, and pulled back into the western Iraqi desert to guard against a coalition invasion of Iraq. With less than eight thousand men to defend the city he deployed his soldiers into small eight-man teams scattered throughout the residential districts, where they would be safer from bombardment. Sgt. Mohammed spent several weeks fortifying a nest in the corner of a residential block. They built embrasures in the windows and concealed them with exterior wall paint, and stockpiled food and ammunition for six months. It was from the observation point on the roof that he watched through his binoculars the American marines landing in helicopters at the airport. The other soldiers in his team saw it too—when he climbed down from the roof he found they had already disappeared.

  Sgt. Mohammed, now alone, called his headquarters. Kamel Sachet himself answered the telephone. Sgt. Mohammed reported that American marines had landed, that his unit had gone to headquarters and not returned and that he awaited further orders. Kamel Sachet asked him how far away the Americans were. Sgt. Mohammed replied that they were on foot without vehicles and he estimated they would reach his street in fifteen minutes. Kamel Sachet asked him if he had a vehicle. Sgt. Mohammed replied that he did not. Kamel Sachet ordered him to make his way, as he was able, back to headquarters.

  Sgt. Mohammed found a bicycle on the street, but by the time he reached the HQ of the 65th Battalion, Kamel Sachet had already left for the other battalion headquarters to assess and organize. Instead he found General Barakh in discussion with several other officers. He gave his report on the American marines at the airport. The commander of the 65th Battalion suggested regrouping the soldiers who had been deployed in the eight-man teams into a striking force for a counterattack. Barakh asked him how long this would take. He was told, “About an hour.”

  “One hour?” Barakh exploded with tension and fury. “One hour is enough for us to lose Kuwait. We don’t have one hour!”

  Barakh had a crop that he kept under his arm, an affectation that recalled his days at the officers’ course at Sandhurst in England, and he whipped at the walls in frustration as a unit of soldiers came running in disarray: “We have lost contact with everyone, the Americans are coming and it’s impossible to stop them!” Barakh dismissed them and railed, cursing Saddam in the clouds:

  “Your plan was the cause of our destruction!” He smashed a window with his elbow, “Ila an ili khala Saddam!” and threw his crop away in disgust. Wheeling around, he issued orders for the administrative papers to be burned and the ammunition destroyed: “Burn everything and leave!”

  Saddam ordered the retreat from Kuwait City too late, later than the panic, and the streets were a mess of flight as everyone scrabbled to get out and back over the border to Basra. Sgt. Mohammed hot-wired a school van he found on the street and left in a loose convoy of stolen cars. They drove up the coastal road because the main highway had been bombed into the highway of death and was impassable with craters and the charred carcasses of men and vehicles. They were bombed on the coastal road too; it rained cluster bomblets that popped up as if on springs and went off like grenades. The van wasn’t made for off road driving; at some point they abandoned it and walked the rest of the way in the dark.

  Chapter 8

  EUPHEMISMS

  AFTER THE SPRING UPRISINGS IN 2004 EVERYONE in Baghdad began to spend more
time inside than outside. Inside there was some sanctuary, although the windows banged with concussions and the gunfire was constantly intermittent; outside there were bombs and columns of black smoke, the sudden low veering clatter of helicopters and armored dragons patrolling the streets. Dr. Laith, a friend and colleague of Dr. Hassan’s, in fact the one who had spoken up for him when he had been arrested in ’83, and was now active in one of the new secular political parties, was shot at on the overpass near his home. He abandoned his car and ran down a side street to escape. When he went back he counted seven bullets embedded in the bodywork, but he couldn’t be sure if he was the target or if it was just crossfire.

  Behind the wall (“call me on your mobile phone when you are turning the corner into my street and I will come and open the gate; the buzzer is not hooked up to the generator and I don’t want you to get out of the car and knock, we are near Adhamiya, some of the neighbors, I don’t know them—some people could see you”), Dr. Laith’s home was large and well appointed. The living room was grand seventies open plan, sofas, side tables, gray velvet and gilt. There were pictures of his children, grown up and safe in the West, in silver frames on a polished coffee table. His wife, Bushra, wearing a chic long house gown and a matching headscarf, came in from the kitchen with a glass of orange juice for me. I was tired and ill and she was sympathetic. She nodded, everyone was tired and ill these days, and sat in the armchair opposite to join in the conversation. Dr. Laith and Bushra’s brother, who had been a general, were looking through a pile of family photographs. I had asked them about the old days, and the memories had come out.

  PHOTOGRAPH: Black-and-white, an old and timeless Arab Bedouin, with a checked scarf wrapped around his deeply lined face, sitting on a donkey minding a small herd of sheep.

  Dr. Laith came from the same poor southern Shia background as Dr. Hassan. His father was an illiterate farmer. He joined the Baath Party in 1961 as a schoolboy; their socialism seemed to assuage the injustice of his poverty, their Pan-Arab nationalism gave him pride. In 1963 his village was hooked up to electricity. The family had a gramophone, but it was broken. Dr. Laith, like Dr. Hassan, joined the army in order to gain sponsorship for his medical studies.

  PHOTOGRAPH: Three young Iraqi men in dark narrow suits and narrow ties of the sixties. They are sitting, laughing, three bottles of beer on the table, three trim mustaches.

  “I think I bought my family their first radio after I graduated from military college. And then their first television in the early seventies.”

  PHOTOGRAPH: Officers graduating from military intelligence school, Dr. Laith among them. The young men are sitting in rows in civilian clothes, sports jackets and checks, underneath a banner: “1977 The Good Soldiers are the Sons of the Revolution and its Party.”

  Dr. Laith specialized in psychology; during the Iran-Iraq war he and Dr. Hassan collaborated on psyops, the mechanics of morale, speeches and slogans and songs. Together they had designed leaflets dropped over Iranian positions.

  “Oh, these old things, these old memories!” said the general. He wore a dark suit and had gray hair and an aquiline profile; his manner was grandfatherly, distinguished, friendly, melancholy. He once told me he had commanded a unit during the Anfal campaign against the Kurds in 1987, ordered to clear villages with artillery and small arms harassment. He carried the image of one woman, who had lost her baby in the panic, running in circles and screaming. Her terror, he confessed, long haunted him.

  PHOTOGRAPH: A family picnic in summer Technicolor, children in swimsuits, deckchairs, Tupperware filled with salads, paper plates. Bushra is wearing a sundress and her feathered blonde hair falls to her bare shoulders. She is stretching her arm toward her small daughter toddling in the grass.

  Dr. Laith quietly shuffled his past. The general lit a cigarette and wiped his eyes, “The seventies. The Golden Years. I’d like to have a bottle of whiskey and cry now.”

  “WE STARTED FEELING something was wrong,” Dr. Laith began, as we reached the eighties and the descent. “There was a kind of chaos. I felt the lie, but I could not say anything or they would cut my neck. If you were executed your disgrace went back to your family, your sons could be killed, your property confiscated. It was as if I was living two personalities. I would do my best as an officer with my duties and then I would come home and speak against the regime. All Iraqis have two or more characters. It was the only way to survive under pressure for such a long time.”

  At the time I nodded, but I still pushed him to explain his own involvement. I had spent six months straight in Baghdad and every week worse, more bombs, more assassinations, more shooting. The violence had crept incrementally so that I did not notice I was scared and the fear sublimated into hangovers, fever, knotted shoulders and a dull numbness in my mind that I did not even have the wit to notice; I had not been able to read a book for two months. I was tired and tried to focus my blur into black and white: “Why?” I asked bluntly, stupidly, “did you go along with it all?”

  “You are talking as a Westerner,” said Dr. Laith, unfolding his professional assessment like a partition. “You have not lived the Iraqi experience. Iraqis use excuses as a defense mechanism. If I am a general and they tell me to invade that village, I will invade the village and kill everyone on the way and I will come back home and I will make my prayers. It has nothing to do with honor. It is fear. There were two kinds of Iraqi officers. Those who would carry out their orders and tell themselves, “I have no power, it is not in my hands,” and go home and pray. And those who obeyed their orders and went home and said to themselves, “I have no power, it is not in my hands,” and drink half a bottle of whiskey. Both will sleep a deep sleep.”

  When Dr. Laith wrote his reports on the psychological conditions of the front-line troops, his first and greatest effort was to protect himself. “We bent the truth. There was fear to say anything.” He carefully checked every line for nuance, he rewrote, weighed and inveigled. Each sentence had to balance a pretense of fact with an analysis that sounded acceptable but was essentially meaningless. “How could we give them bad news?”

  IN JANUARY 1991 Dr. Laith was recalled from his research into cognitive therapy for phobias for his Ph.D. thesis and sent to the front in Kuwait to report on army morale.

  He remembered a conversation with a friend of his who was a unit commander, dug into the desert waiting for the Americans to come. The officer spoke to him in a monotone: “I expect to be attacked tomorrow. In this extended desert, in front of a superior army, how can I ask for help? I am certain all communications will be lost. I have supplies for only a short time. I am responsible for my men. How am I going to prevent the loss of their lives? Already I have the mentality of loss, and most of the other officers are the same. We are thinking: How can we stay alive?”

  Dr. Laith wrote in his report: “The morale of the soldiers is not what we would wish.”

  In the evenings, discussions in the Officers’ Club in Basra belied the undertow. The world was watching. The Arab League leaders seesawed between their realpolitik diplomacy and pandering to the anti-Western outrage of their repressed populations. Colonel Gaddafi made a public declaration from Libya about destroying American hegemonic aggression. Dr. Laith commented to his fellow officers, in general conversation, that Gaddafi’s pronouncement was farcical, hollow rhetoric cast so many thousands of kilometers away from the battlefield, and added sarcastically, “As if he would screw himself trying to fight the Americans, like our own leader has done!”

  As soon as he said it, he regretted it. A small silence formed like a bubble around his comment. He dared not glance up at Brigadier Bari to see if he had been paying attention. There was already an argument between them. A couple of months before, when the Americans had first threatened war and the petrol stations in Baghdad were closed and the fuel supplies paralyzed, Dr. Laith had arranged for twenty liters to be delivered from some official source to his home but the brigadier had intercepted them for his own use.

>   The general conversation resumed but Dr. Laith sat apart from it, when the group broke up he tried to remonstrate with Brigadier Bari, but to no avail. Dr. Laith knew a report would be made, it was inevitable, but he hoped that there was a chance the report would get lost in the paperwork: it was one small thing and there was a war on and there were so many things…

  DR. LAITH WATCHED the soldiers, the remnants of an army of almost 800,000 men, come out of the killing desert of Kuwait hungry, wounded, in disarray, lost. The retreat was like a wildfire Chinese whisper: messengers that deserted, scrawled desperate communiqués; radio static. For several days the Iraqi army slowly trudged, bewildered, sad and angry. Thousands of soldiers on foot, their legs swollen from walking, took off their chafing boots. Their officers ripped off their rank insignia; they had lost their soldiers and had no idea where their units were. The morgue in Basra was full, bodies were piled up on the streets; there were abandoned corpses on the roads. Soldiers sat in shops, in cafés, lay down in the parks and slumped on pavements, it was raining and it was cold and the misery in their eyes was visible. The bridges over the Tigris were bombed, only the narrow, single-lane, pontoon bridge was passable and it was stuck with traffic. There was complete loss of control. Soldiers were cursing Saddam openly.

  In the confused disillusion, Dr. Laith saw Special Forces General Kamel Sachet and a senior colleague pacing the empty basketball court at the Officers’ Club. Kamel Sachet had left Kuwait City thirty-six hours before, driving his white Mercedes himself, leading a convoy of jeeps and trucks along the highway of death with no comms except the short-range hiss of walkie talkies. They had weaved through bombs, black smoke, wreckage, as F16 jets glinted like silver in the high drawn dawn. When they reached the Iraqi border, dust rimmed and adrenaline spent, Kamel Sachet brushed his uniform carefully and told his driver (who had, on this occasion, traveled in the back seat) to wash the car. He said he would not carry even dust from Kuwait as dishonor.