The Weight of a Mustard Seed

by Wendell Steavenson

  On the basketball court of the Officers’ Club he strode and snarled. He was furious and his fury was without fear. “Everything was lost because of them! I was told there would be no retreat and then suddenly they ordered me to retreat!” He talked openly, angrily, extraordinarily, shockingly. Dr. Laith kept quiet and listened. General Sachet excoriated Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam’s Viceroy of Kuwait. His orders had been absurd! One day they were ordered to arrest everyone with a beard, another day they must arrest everyone driving a certain kind of car, another day men who wrapped their red-and-white scarves around their heads. The idiocy, the excesses, the crassness…General Sachet continued, seething with the blackness of defeat furled, like the smoke from the bombed retreat, in his lungs. He was usually a taciturn man but now the words flew out of his shame and lacerated the atmosphere like shrapnel. “They killed them as if they were animals!”

  DR. LAITH INTERVIEWED soldiers in the city. Many openly blamed Saddam. On the night of 1 March 1991, the day before the intifada flared, Dr. Laith delivered an oral report on the state of the morale of the army to the Minister of Defense, Saad al-Jobouri, and his deputy, Sultan Hashem.

  He chose his words carefully. He told them the soldiers were displaying signs of clinical hysteria and that they were using bad language. He did not tell them that the soldiers had begun to heckle Saddam, because cursing the leader was a capital crime and if he had heard the leader being cursed and had not informed the Amn, then he would have been considered an accessory.

  DR. LAITH GOT out of the city only hours before the uprising against the regime erupted. He went home to Baghdad, put his head down and took up his research again. The events in Basra took a few months to catch up with him. On 26 October 1991 two men from the Military Amn called at his house at about 4 p.m. They told him that General Khazem wished to see him. General Khazem was a friend of his and he thought the summons was routine. He changed into his army uniform and got into the waiting car. The windows of the car were tinted black and this was not usual. There was a driver and an officer and a bodyguard in the car and this was not usual. Still, Dr. Laith did not want to alarm himself. They arrived at General Khazem’s office, which he knew well, and the two men left him at the reception to make telephone calls. It was only then Dr. Laith felt something was not right and within minutes he was blindfolded with a piece of rubber and taken to the Istikhbarat office in Kadhamiya and thrown into an isolation cell for one month.

  Dr. Laith stopped his retelling. He looked up and told me he thought he had seen the former Brigadier Bari on the street a few days before.

  “Did he see you?”

  “Yes, I think so. I wanted to confront him, I wanted him to admit that he made a mistake. Some people who were imprisoned are now asking for compensation from their persecutors—but I think Iraq needs some measure of forgiveness and this forgiveness should start from people confessing their mistakes.”

  Dr. Laith was in solitary confinement for one month and then his case was brought before a judge. The judge was, by chance, a friend of his and did not want to be placed in the position of passing judgment and so he referred the case to a revolutionary tribunal, citing the political content of the case and arguing that his court had limited jurisdiction over such matters. Dr. Laith was moved to a prison in an old barracks near Ramadi which had been used to hold Iranian POWs. The commandant of the prison was also a friend of his, and he had an air conditioner in his room, books to read and visitors on Fridays. After three or four months of legal confusion his file was referred back to the original judge who saw that it was not a case in which any powerful players had a direct interest and now found it politically safe for him to sentence Dr. Laith to time served. Afterward the judge tried to apologize in a way that would encourage Dr. Laith to be grateful to him for his leniency to a friend. But imprisonment had changed Dr. Laith. He refused to play this game. He reminded the judge that if he had been tried as a political case in a revolutionary tribunal he could have been sentenced to death.

  He went home, re-evaluated, thinking, eyes open. After a few weeks, old friends and colleagues came to him with offers of jobs, promotions, extra salaries—the head of the Baghdad Amn came personally—but he turned them all down. He found himself outside the circle, isolated, afraid, unable to sleep. But still he resisted. He saw that the resumption of rank and status, after being arrested, cowed a man forever.

  “It bears a very complicated psychological explanation.” Dr. Laith had examined himself over several years. Why had he resisted the pull of his old Baathie life? “I have had to answer these questions: Why had I been with these people? What had I done?

  “I go back to the circle. From 1979, from the beginning of the time of Saddam Hussein, the circle was closed completely and my thinking was limited. It became a matter of fear. It was impossible to go outside the circle because then you would be an enemy and your life would be under threat. Those that left the circle, most of us, were pushed or shocked out. It was the philosophy of Saddam Hussein. You would be shocked out of the circle and then he would pull you back in and it would be worse because there would be more fear than before. If you went back you would live under fear and become the perfect obeyer of orders.”

  His unwillingness to return to the fold allowed him some moral solace.

  “It was only in this moment that I behaved a little bravely.” He did not sleep; he expected to be re-arrested, but this defiance saved him. He managed to leave Iraq in 1996. His life in exile, in Libya, Syria and finally London, was demeaning and difficult, he had lost his position and his money. His wife Bushra had to live separated from him in Damascus. She started to wear the veil.

  “I felt lost,” she explained, “I felt lost and I went to the Koran.”

  PHOTOGRAPH: Laith and Bushra at a party in the seventies. Laith had wide pinstriped lapels and a big kipper tie, Bushra is wearing a feathery strappy satin evening gown. They are wearing party hats on their heads and smiling. There is a bottle of champagne on the table.

  “I have not changed inside.” Bushra continued, “I talk to people, laugh with them. I go to parties and dance. These things are not prohibited. But my outside look has changed.”

  “I am against the hijab,” said her husband ruefully.

  “I don’t like it either,” agreed Bushra, shrugging, “but God has imposed it upon us.”

  “It is something Islamic,” Dr. Laith tried to explain. “My wife now puts on hijab, she feels the religion of it. Even though her father was a religious man and he never made her wear it as a girl, in fact he used to buy her fashionable clothes. In the sixties and seventies we used to walk in Baghdad and come across maybe one woman in a whole day who was wearing the black hijab and we looked at her as if she was retarded. But the Arab nation and the Islamic nation have been under pressure, they began to see that the ideologies of the world, communism or Baathism, didn’t solve their problems. They looked for mercy, they went back to their religion to look for a safe haven. They are searching for a solution.”

  “A solution to what?”

  “This region has been a trap for us since the fifties, sixties, our economic status is deteriorating. There is no security in the whole region. The issues have no solution, like Palestine, like security in general, like the administrations…”

  PHOTOGRAPH: Laith wearing a clean white dishdasha in Mecca on Haj in 1973.

  “I believe Eastern society has had a kind of breakdown and gone back to their religion.”

  “A crisis of confidence? A moral retrenchment?”

  “Definitely.”

  Dr. Laith sat back in his chair and showed me pictures of his children, in Germany, in America, graduating and thriving, but far away.

  “But I kept this thing,” he told me, as if reminding himself, and later I was reminded of Sgt. Mohammed and the other officers who had managed to get out of Iraq and re-learn some measure of perspective, “this one good thing, this moment,” continued Dr. Laith, “I refused.”


  Chapter 9

  UPRISING

  SADDAM HAD GATHERED ALL HIS MIGHT AND SWOLLEN pride into a great wave that crashed, shattering its kinetic tumult into spurts and spray of white noise, fizz and confusion.

  Kamel Sachet was in Basra. Tired soldiers milled, senior commanders stalled, the mob vented and seethed. On 1 March 1991, the day after President Bush declared a cessation of hostilities, an Iraqi tankist shot a tank round through a portrait of Saddam: a gaping hole in the wall of fear. Kamel Sachet was in his white Mercedes with official government plates. His usual driver, his nephew Abdul Qadir, was driving; in the front seat was a loyal lieutenant. They were close to the shore of the Shatt al Arab when they were confronted by a knot of rioters, stones cracked the windshield, shots were fired. Kamel Sachet shouted to abandon the car and led their flight, shooting his pistol as meager covering fire. They made it around a corner, down a side street, over a cross roads, to the gate of the Republican Palace complex. But the palace was still under construction, there was no garrison inside. They banged on the locked gate, shouting to open! open! The guard on the other side hesitated, Kamel Sachet shouted, “I am a general, for God’s sake, open the gate, we are under attack!” But by the time the guard unlocked the gate, the crowd had caught up with them. Suddenly, grinding around the corner, by some miracle, appeared a tank column. The rioters dispersed, running into the side streets; the tank commander hauled the three of them up onto his tank. He looked at Kamel Sachet for an order.

  “Back to your headquarters. We’ll get more information there.” They could hear gunfire and see thin columns of black smoke between buildings. The tanks crunched slowly back through the empty streets; they listened, trying to locate the source of a distant clamor, but the noise was fragmented, like a bouncing echo. They passed their white Mercedes, windows smashed and gutted by fire.

  The first days of the uprising were a genuine spontaneous expression of rage and frustration, a grass roots free-for-all, the angst of the demobilized soldiers mixed with pent-up resentment of the southern Shia (those Tikriti bandit cousins lining their own pockets with the old smug Sunni elite), which spread, Basra to Nasiriyeh to Amara to Kut, Kerbala, Najaf. Party headquarters were burned, hated officials strung up, offices looted; a rush of foaming fuck-you. And then posters of Ayatollah Khomeini began appearing over the anti Saddam graffiti, the exile Shia Badr Brigade showed up in black shirts, mullahs exhorted from minarets, and Iranian soldiers crept over the border and manned checkpoints.

  The uprising was all over Basra but it never took complete control of the city. Basra had been the center of operations for Kuwait and there were too many bases in town and around it, as well as the presence of the defense minister and the chief of staff and several senior commanders. In the first days Kamel Sachet stayed at the headquarters of the 10th Battalion. The base was safe enough, defended by high walls and a thousand fresh troops who had not been in Kuwait. Abdul Qadir told me they found an empty office room with a broken window and the three of them holed up there. He cooked rice and scrounged cans of soup. The gunfire continued, intense and sporadic. Kamel Sachet was quiet.

  Hamdani had been wounded in the retreat (a flesh wound in his leg; shrapnel from an American bomb) and found himself washed up at some overrun base in the desert, a staging point in the general flight, before he made his way back to Baghdad. “Incidents evolved…It was an action and a reaction…There was no coherent strategy, everyone asked each other, ‘What’s going on?’” He said he thought many would have been like Kamel Sachet at that moment, perched on a fulcrum, frozen between pit and pendulum.

  President George H. W. Bush had broadcast his encouragement of the uprising over the Voice of America, urging “the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands.” Overhead American jets flew reconnaissance sorties; on the ground scout units and vanguard armor chased the fleeing Iraqis through the desert and then stood by as the Iraqi army shelled its own towns. But as the Iranians began to take advantage of the situation and show their hand among the Shia in the South more openly, the Americans dared not risk an Iranian takeover of the South. They pulled their forward armor back and tacitly allowed Saddam to fly his helicopters. Better the devil you know, they thought, better the devil than the Iranians. If the Americans had left their forward units in the southern Iraqi desert, if they had intervened more directly, the uprising might have had a chance—but there was no political will to push on to Baghdad. As Donald Rumsfeld, then defense secretary, later explained, “I would guess if we had gone in there, I would still have forces in Baghdad today. We’d be running the country. We would not have been able to get everybody out and bring everybody home.”

  I don’t know what was going through Kamel Sachet’s mind in those days of insurrection. Abdul Qadir told me his uncle sympathized with the uprising; certainly among the rebels were many of his own soldiers, but as angry as he was at the destruction of the army, the shame of the defeat and the blunt stupidity of it all, he could not countenance desertion. He had seen soldiers—even officers—in the melee pulling their chevrons from their battledress and exchanging their uniforms for dishdashas. “I would never take my rank from my shoulders,” he said. And he could not countenance anarchy, whipped up among the Shia by Iran—it became a matter of national security. Hamdani told me, in his opinion, “If it wasn’t for the uprising and the Iranian interference there would have been a huge movement against Saddam Hussein by the army, even the Republican Guards.”

  OFFICERS WERE SCATTERED, walked home through the desert, took off their uniforms, sat at home and drank or prayed, hid in relatives’ houses, ignored recalls to arms, conferred in whispers and unease. Saddam used those closest to him, Ali Hassan al-Majid and his cousin and son-in-law Hussein Kamel, to put down the uprising. They gathered what officers they could and mustered clots of Mukhabarat thugs and bodyguards to rally contingents where they found them. They said, “This is not a civil war!” Fourteen of Iraq’s eighteen provinces had blown into rebellion; party offices and garrisons in every major city except Mosul and Baghdad were overrun. They called it “Treason! Backstabbing treason!” The uprising was an American-Iranian plot and those who participated in it were traitors.

  IRAQIS OFTEN TOLD me, only half joking, that Iraqis were an unruly mass of shirugi (a slang word for thick-headed Marsh Arabs) who needed the rule of the rod, a strongman, to control them. Saddam was a murderous bastard, but he was effective, he was respected. He compared himself to the conqueror Saladin, he carved his initials into Nebuchadnezzar’s palace at Babylon, and during the uprising he smashed his fist on the table and unleashed his wrath.

  Once in Baghdad I met an instrument of this fury. Emad was a square brick of the regime, he had been in Saddam’s bodyguard regiment. He was a reflection of his overlord: “They call me the murderer!” he boasted. “They call me crazy…They call me Mr. Mustache!” To Emad, Saddam was mighty, second only to God.

  “I used to love him a lot, and I still love him as a character. He was a good man inside. It was only the Tikritis who were bad and they were everywhere. When he was captured I cried. They never would have caught him like that; in a hole. It was something else—a drug, a trick.” He looked down at his lap. “On the second day we heard that it wasn’t him, I was fooling myself, I shot so many shots in the sky, five magazines!”

  He told me how he had once seen Saddam summon one of his relatives who had angered him by divorcing his wife and taking up with a younger girl. Saddam commanded him to take his wife back but the relative refused. Saddam pulled out a gun. “He took a decision in one second, like that!” Emad admired such decisiveness, he called it brave. “And shot him between the eyes.”

  That March Emad went with a posse of Special Amn under Hussein Kamel to put down the uprising in the Shia shrine town of Kerbala. They had bags of money and paid the street kids as runner-spies to tell them where the traitors were hiding. They went from house to house, killing. In one place, Emad recounted, he cut
one man’s throat with his knife and shot another man sitting on a sofa. He was ordered to fire an RPG into a house with a mother and her children inside, but he refused. His officer was furious and called Hussein Kamel to report him.

  Hussein Kamel pointed, “Come here, Mr. Mustache! You think it’s up to you? I am the President’s cousin!”

  Emad saluted him.

  “Why do you not obey orders?”

  Emad’s knees were trembling. He had seen people shot for less. But Hussein Kamel agreed that it was a waste of ammunition, and he was only sent to prison.

  In prison they beat him and lashed him raw for several days and pushed him into a vat of urine. When he was released they sent him to a special Amn hospital to recover and then he was put back on duty as if nothing had happened.

  Emad was not an educated man, he was not given to self reproach or much emotional analysis, but he guessed enough at his “badness” to try to balance it with an effort to proffer his own humanity. He told me that he had a recurring nightmare in which he was given an order that he couldn’t complete, that the bloody image of the man he had stabbed in Kerbala came back in his dreams. A religious sheikh advised him to pray for forgiveness and sacrifice a sheep, and he had done this, but it had not helped. If he became angry, he admitted, he could beat someone “without control”; he said he had felt numb and indifferent when his father had died, but that a small instance of suffering, like a child begging on the street, could move him to tears. In the nineties Emad had been assigned to Uday’s bodyguard: cars, girls and violent mayhem; once he saw Uday split a man’s head open in a restaurant in front of his wife and children, once Uday had tried to drown him in a swimming pool as a joke. Emad had wanted to quit but it was impossible. He told me he had broken his own arm to gain time off and wrapped the fracture with a fish so that it would heal slower.