The Weight of a Mustard Seed

by Wendell Steavenson

  We paused. It was very stark and clear. We shook our heads, drank more wine. How could this be stopped? It could not be stopped. We were sitting in a city where the pock-marks of bullet holes of fifteen years of civil war were still visible. Chaos could not be controlled; it seemed it had first to exhaust itself. After the soccer was over and the Spanish had indeed won, a band played old Lebanese songs and everyone became sentimental, singing laments of love and war, clapping to encourage two red-lipsticked, full bodied Levantine women who got up to dance with sashaying hips and pathos, plucking the sweet melancholy rhythm from the smoky air with their fingertips. We applauded unknowing, as the last easy moment of a happy drunken corner of the Middle East slipped past midnight. Three weeks later Hezbollah and Israel went to war. More bombs, more death.

  ADNAN HAD KNOWN Kamel Sachet well. Kamel Sachet’s family hailed from the Albu Hassoun subdivision of the Janabi tribe, a clan with a hardscrabble history of marginal land and minority and a reputation of pride and aggression—Adnan told me that as recently as the fifties the Albu Hassoun had fought the fierce Garaghul over land that had been reconfigured by the meanderings of the Euphrates. There was killing on both sides but in the popular imagination it was the Albu Hassoun who cowed the Garaghul. Janabis liked to marry their daughters into the Albu Hassoun for the protection the alliance afforded. It was said a Janabi should always employ an Albu Hassoun bodyguard or else he would be robbed. “The Albu Hassoun were not to be meddled with!” Adnan laughed. “But Kamel Sachet was a great hero for all Janabis.”

  Kamel Sachet’s farm near Hilla was close to Adnan’s father’s land and Adnan got to know him in the eighties when he would often come to the mudhif and sit, a glass of tea in one hand, his red beret at his elbow, and wait patiently while the other guests dispersed. He preferred to talk to the Sheikh in a private audience, and Adnan perceived that he was independent, almost a loner. Adnan was impressed with his careful, frank manner of speaking and his tone of responsibility leavened with self-deprecation. Kamel Sachet liked to talk about his farm, irrigation and crops, date harvests, water rights. The Sheikh would tell him of tribal matters, the minor scandals of Janabis, who had positions in the presidential apparatus, and they would discuss people they knew, commanders, anecdotes, trouble and promotions. Kamel Sachet always offered to help any Janabi when he could. He paid for the daughter of an executed officer to go to university and study to be a pharmacist, he gave soldiers leave to attend funerals or weddings, or, if they had gone AWOL, an official note of excuse that could save their lives. This was the tradition of wasta, connections, the patronage of tribe.

  Kamel Sachet’s deepening religious observance was obvious. He read many religious books and often listened to religious sheikhs, but Adnan noticed that he did not follow any one in particular. He fasted when the calendar required and prayed according to the timetable, but he deplored extra fasting or praying through the night as mystical indulgences. Even when his father died Kamel Sachet did not attend the funeral; he said such gatherings were distasteful to him and not true Islam. In the Hadith it is written that burials should be quick and simple without pomp and fuss. Adnan’s elder brother Khalid, then Mayor of Baghdad, who had succeeded his father as Sheikh, had to send a car for him so that Kamel Sachet would be able respectfully to receive the envoy that Saddam was sending.

  Kamel Sachet acquiesced to this political nicety, but he made it clear to his brothers: “This is your right to receive condolences if you wish. But I am here as my social duty, I am not here to receive condolences.”

  I suggested to Adnan, during one of our conversations, that Kamel Sachet’s religiosity was, in some measure, a moral retrenchment. Adnan nodded.

  “His battle was internal, to reconcile himself with the state. He was exercising his duty as an officer, as a general. He did not become a recluse or a rebel. He did not become Osama bin Laden or a saint. He was not a weak person who did good deeds in order to go to heaven. But he needed this rock to hang on to as he tried to navigate his moral compass in a corrupt state in which he was an important person.”

  Kamel Sachet became trapped by his position and his duty to his position. Adnan had spent much of his life recusing his own position. In the sixties he had studied economics in London and been part of an Iraqi exile group that monitored human rights abuses and political prisoners during the short lived Baathie takeover in 1963. In the seventies he had returned to Iraq and accepted a position in the new oil ministry helping to organize the nationalization of Iraqi oil, long a dream of his. But he soon ran foul of Vice President Saddam Hussein. In 1973 OPEC announced the oil embargo in response to the October war with Israel; Adnan discovered that Saddam was involved in selling oil in breach of the embargo, behind the back of the Baath Party regional command. Somehow (wasta) he survived Saddam’s anger and managed to retire to the country.

  “I put on a dishdasha and became a farmer and I had the biggest fish farm in the Middle East and I became a very rich man with that fish farm.”

  He did all that he could to live apart from the regime and its entrapments. His brother Khalid was the opposite. Khalid became close to Saddam, he often went hunting with him, and rose through the Party ranks to Mayor of Baghdad—Adnan admonished him, tried to reason with him, but to no avail. Part of the reason that he was left alone in his country exile, he knew, was that Khalid had brokered an understanding with Saddam. But after many years excused, he found himself pulled back into the morass. In 1995, Khalid died in Rome, possibly poisoned, possibly on Saddam’s orders; Adnan became the new Sheikh of the Janabis and was duly summoned.

  A car was sent to his house in Baghdad. He did not know where he was being taken nor could he ask. On arrival at a government building he was shown to a room and told to wait. After a while, perhaps half an hour, he was taken in a second car, escorted through a checkpoint into the grounds of the Republican Palace. He was shown into an anteroom where his identity documents were re-checked and his name uttered into a telephone. The officers there smiled and were respectful and asked him politely if he had waited long, if his family was well, inshallah, it was hot today, more hot than usual! They asked him to take everything out of his pockets, wallet, house keys, a small notebook, which they took and placed in a pouch. Then a doctor in a white coat came into the room and asked him to open his hands facing up and traced his palms with his fingertips like a fortune teller. He was told to take off his watch. He was told to take off his clothes. The two attending officials remained polite. He took off his vest and his underpants. The officers checked his clothes thoroughly and ran their hands over every seam and looked carefully inside his polished shoes. This naked humiliation—Adnan pursed his lips with distaste and shame as he remembered—induced a measure of self-recoil.

  He was asked to put his clothes back on, and when he had dressed, he was shown into an office guarded by two soldiers on the door. Mr. President, Saddam Hussein, sat behind a large but ordinary desk. Adnan stood before him; there was no chair to sit on. Saddam leaned back in his chair, cleared his throat and chortled what he imagined was a friendly greeting. “Heh heh heh.”

  Adnan’s position as Sheikh was both precarious and protected. He tried to avoid the functionary requirements, the summons of all Sheikhs and the hand-outs of envelopes of money, “a pathetic amount, less than $1,000; I took it only once, because a Janabi in the Presidency advised me I must, and I gave it away to charity.” Like almost all Iraqis, he maneuvered the best he could manage and hoped for an Iraq after Saddam.

  THE END, WHEN it came, was a foreign invasion. The Americans! Operation Iraqi Freedom! Weapons of Mass Destruction! War on Terror! Mission Accomplished! Tank columns streaming through the desert, shock and awe exploding palaces. For the Iraqis there was a chink of hope amid all the destruction and the conundrum of how to be free under occupation.

  On 10 April 2003, the day after Americans pulled Saddam’s statue down in Firdous Square in Baghdad, Adnan convened a tribal meeting in Latifiya, a t
own south of Baghdad heavily populated by Janabis. He asked his elders, the tribal judges and leaders of smaller affiliated tribes, what they wished to do. Many said that the dignity of Iraq was being trampled and they should fight. Adnan listened and replied: “If we all agree to fight then I will fight with you and we will fight together. But first think of the consequences. This is the Americans, they have their annihilating bombs. If we fight, they will certainly retaliate against any resistance. I do not think the Americans come to take our land; they have no imperial will or ambition. I believe they want to install a government over which they have some influence—and where in the world is there a government over which America has no influence? Perhaps it is better to wait and co-operate and we will be better able to protect our families and our communities in this way.”

  At the beginning the tribal elders agreed and resistance was petty. Once a week the American commander in Hilla came to see Adnan in his mudhif for consultation. Adnan was able to discover which Janabis they were targeting for arrest and in some circumstances get some detained Janabis released. But after six months the arrests and night-time hard-knock raids grew more frequent and indiscriminate, false witness and vested interest; even tribal dignitaries were being arrested and sucked into Abu Ghraib without process or paper trail, denied lawyers, interrogated, ignored, lost in the system for weeks while their families petitioned locked gates. The American commander in Hilla rotated and Adnan found he had no influence with his successor. In Baghdad he could not gain access to the local commanders at all.

  People grew angry, unsettled. A Janabi imam denounced Adnan at Friday prayer: “Our sheikh: a collaborator!” The imam was banished by tribal council, barred from preaching by other imams, and Adnan sought out a meeting with him to confront his views. The preacher said to him, “I concede you are trying to help. But all these tribal leaders are useless. We have a new situation here. They are only looking after their own goats.”

  One night, a few months into the occupation, Adnan and his wife and his two grown sons were at home in Baghdad watching television. They heard a loud banging blast and rattling and then shouting. His home was being raided. Several American soldiers, oversized, bulked up with armored vests and combat webbing, helmets like storm troopers, night sights like metal mandibles, burst in. Adnan stood up to remonstrate but he was pushed by a shoving, gloved hand at the back of his neck, face down into the carpet.

  We were sitting in Beirut, talking in a quiet bar, Adnan was drinking whiskey. When he told me this story he did not look at me, he looked down into his glass, at bitter brackish memory.

  “They don’t understand anything about our culture, nothing.”

  I said something sympathetic. I understood, I told him, about curdled pride—for the head of the family to be dishonored this way in front of his wife and sons—not the fear (no Iraqi ever admitted to fear), but the humiliation of it.

  Adnan cut me off. “No. It is not the same.” He was not any ordinary man suffering the indignity of occupation. He was a sheikh, a leader. “It was unacceptable,” he insisted, “completely unacceptable.”

  Adnan never told anyone what had happened. He bent his pride and went on trying to work with the Americans within the framework of the ongoing political process, the efforts to write a constitution and prepare for a sovereign Iraqi government. He joined the government as a minister without portfolio, and allied himself to Ayad Allawi, who the Americans were positioning as a secular unifying Iraqi leader. At the end of March 2004, after four American contractors were attacked driving through Fallujah and the Americans surrounded the town with tanks, Adnan tried to negotiate between the Americans and a local insurgent leader who was a Janabi. The insurgent leader agreed to evict the foreign fighters in return for a ceasefire, but local jihadi firebrands called him a traitor and denounced any compromise.

  “The moderates always lose after a while,” Adnan lamented. He tried to talk to the “hotheads,” but admonishment and reason were deflected with ideology. The tide had already turned, violence crashed into press conferences, and the insurgency made any political process moot, although no one yet admitted this. The Shia exile parties, the Dawa and SCIRI (Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq), the latter an Iranian protégé, held the ascendancy, local Shia factions (mostly the Mehdi army) armed themselves by joining the police force, then feuded and blew into revolt; and the Sunnis became embittered and enflamed and complained rancorously, to no apparent effect, that the Americans were taking sides.

  IN JANUARY 2005, just before the first elections, I went to see Adnan in Baghdad at a house he rented in a guarded ministerial compound adjacent to the GreenZone. He said he would send an escort car with two of his bodyguards, and we arranged to meet them in a flat space of cracked asphalt underneath the Jadriyeh bridge. In the past it had been a place where husbands came to teach their wives how to drive, now it was an open-air speakeasy in defiance of Shia vigilantes who firebombed the alcohol shops. It was twilight, a guard-gunman waved us in. Men sat on the concrete parapet along the river with cans of beer in their hand or a small flask of arak in front of them, watching the purple dust dusk settle, sunset over the Tigris smudged with the black smoke from the Dora power station.

  Adnan’s bodyguards found us, signaled to follow them and we drove around the edge of the GreenZone, twelve foot high concrete blast walls on one side. At some point there was an opening and we turned right into a concrete canyon and stopped at a checkpoint. The bodyguards in the car ahead of us showed their passes and we were waved through, around another bend, slowed into a tank jack chicane, and waited behind another car being checked at the second checkpoint by Iraqi army soldiers. The two men in the car ahead held their arms out to be padded down. Above us was a watchtower on stilts fortified with sandbags. We got out of the car to show our identification and present our bags to be searched. I looked up, the concrete blast walls made a trench of narrowed sky edged with filigree razor wire. The soldiers finished searching the two men in the car ahead of us and handed them back their guns, a Kalashnikov to one, a pistol to the other, who stuffed it back in the waistband of his trousers.

  The searched us perfunctorily. One of the soldiers excitedly pointed at his chest, making a joke.

  “Saddam Hussein. Me Saddam Hussein!”

  “Bah! Your mustache is not big enough!”

  And he pointed to his ID, which showed that his name was indeed Saddam Hussein.

  We found Adnan in a fury. He had just resigned from the cabinet.

  “Oh the D.o.D. has its own ideas, they trample over everyone’s heads. Practically everything that could go wrong happened. They actually made every single error they could have. What they say is correct. We are stooges of the Americans.”

  He had resigned in protest at all of the mess and manipulation and because the day before he had been arrested by a sneering and officious American sergeant at an entrance to the GreenZone where he was going for a meeting with the Deputy Prime Minister. The sergeant had looked at his pass and said it was no longer valid. Adnan asked to see his commanding officer, the sergeant became even ruder, Adnan asked his name and unit. The sergeant looked at his men, irritated and nonchalant, “I think he’s gotta be arrested.” So they pinned his arms behind his back and tied his hands with plastic flexi cuffs and showed no interest in his protestations.

  Now he cursed his participation. Several of his relatives had been kidnapped and killed. He was used to driving himself, without bodyguards and unarmed. Now he traveled in a five car convoy with thirty gunmen, “And,” he added, in sheer frustration rather than fear, “I am never safe!”

  FOR A LONG time the civil war was called sectarian violence. It was piebald, bandit, vicious, hard to fathom and impossible to contain. Baghdad neighborhoods became cantons, separated by vigilante gunmen groups, berms, roadblocks, checkpoints, ID killings. Families (many of whom were mixed; it was common for Sunni to marry Shia) were labeled and then forced out of their homes at gunpoint. Sout
h of Baghdad Sunni and Shia were historically mingled around Latifiya and Mahmoudiya, Shia were hauled out of their cars on the roads and shot, reprisals, revenge, intimidation flared through the villages. Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia mixed with local insurgent groups, the reconstituted Iraqi army, such as it was, seemed full of Shia thugs or Kurdish mercenaries. The area became known as the Triangle of Death.

  Adnan was exhausted by the violence. “The Americans are murdering Janabis and the Janabis, whether they are Sunni or Shia, are murdering each other!” He swallowed a gulp of whiskey.

  “And the Janabis are the worst!”

  BEIRUT, ISRAELI BOMBS and its own civil disorder notwithstanding, was respite. By the summer of 2007, when I saw him, Adnan had relaxed into his exile. I met him in Paul for coffee and we sat surrounded by the Lebanese grandee class with its peacock women: high lacquered hair, arched eyebrows, lip liner and bronzed cleavage, Cartier watches looped around their wrists and Prada bags dangling from their fingers. Adnan and I laughed a little at the display; I noticed he himself had adopted resort wear: he was tanned and wore a crisp beige linen safari suit with no tie.

  “I would rather be chic than sheikh,” he joked, showing off his new sunglasses. “You see I am relaxed these days, I am doing practically nothing!” He handed me a business card with the name of the new think tank channeling technocratic expertise into policy and legislation suggestions for the Iraqi government. He shrugged, he said it kept his mind ticking over, his efforts engaged.

  The civil war had entered the warlord phase. The news was consistently atrocious. Adnan admitted he could no longer bring himself to watch it; I said I could not either. There was no point even talking about it any more. Instead I asked him about his son Salam. He looked at his watch, not for the first time, I realized.