The Weight of a Mustard Seed

by Wendell Steavenson

  “He’s at the airport. He should be getting on a plane to Amman soon—but, you know, always delays. Sometimes you have to spend all night at the airport if there’s a security alert.”

  “But he’s at the airport,” I confirmed to encourage him, “so he got through the road alright.”

  “Yes, yes,” Adnan nodded, “but this morning I was very nervous about it.”

  Salam had been in Baghdad for the previous four months, waiting to get a new G-series passport that would allow him to travel. The new G-series passports were gold dust in Iraq then, it was a year of exodus, hundreds of thousands of people had left their homes, many fled across the easiest border, to Syria. Salam had sensibly bribed someone in the passport office, but that person had been arrested and so they had to worry about Salam’s name showing up on some blacklist and then they had to find other people to bribe. Finally, he had got the passport just three days before. Adnan said he didn’t think Salam had left the house more than three times in the whole past four months.

  “It’s an Iraqi mess,” I ventured. “Now it seems like an Iraqi mess even more than an American mess.”

  Adnan nodded. I widened the discussion. I said I had been reading to try to understand—the breakdown of society, moral collapse, barbarism, totalitarianism—not the books written now, in the contemporaneous maelstrom, but books from another time and place, from Stalin’s Russia and the aftermath of the Nazis: the old school history trick of compare and contrast. I mentioned Solzhenitsyn.

  “You know I could never finish Gulag Archipelago,” he said.

  I told him I couldn’t either. “I mean I read it. But I could not read it as a whole beginning to end. It was too long, too terrible.” We discussed parallels and insight, but the mirror was too sharp to be able to look at directly.

  I said to him, “You know, what I always remember from the Gulag Archipelago is the beginning, when he describes how most people, officials, mid level men who knew what the system was because they were part of it, who sat in those new apparatchik apartment blocks in Moscow and watched their neighbors disappear and the apartments around them empty, sat at home and simply waited to be arrested, they did not flee or hide or disappear into some small town somewhere. Even when the knock came, they did not try to run or jump out of the window or get away…”

  “Yes,” said Adnan, “in ’74 you know what I did when I had that call from Saddam? After I wrote the report about his oil selling deals during the embargo. I had a call from Saddam and he threatened me directly. Afterwards I left the office immediately. I collected my wife from her university campus, we collected Salam, he was small then, from kindergarten, and I drove around for several hours. My wife told me: whatever you decide I am with you. I had the possibility to go to the countryside or to Kurdistan because I had friends in the resistance there, and there was a mutiny in that year and you could get to an area which the government did not control—but I went home.” He paused, evaluating. “It was a subconscious submission. I cannot rationalize it, even now. I went home and I stayed at home for two weeks.”

  Adnan explained that he found his own behavior all the more mystifying because he had plenty of experience of the consequences of a Saddam threat. He had been in the Communist Party, he had taken part in the violent demonstrations in Baghdad in 1956 and been shot at. In 1963, while the Baathies were having their first coup in Iraq, he was in London taking witness accounts of murder, rape and torture; Saddam’s name had come up in conjunction with the execution of a Janabi who was a Communist friend of his. He knew the Iranian opposition to the Shah, he had connections with the Algerian NLF, in Iraq in 1961 and 1962 he had met Kurds in the North.

  “So I knew the game. I knew the underground and its violence. But in ’74 when I was threatened I went home. I don’t know. I really don’t know why. I used to try and rationalize this behavior, but I don’t think it’s useful any more.”

  In trying to comfort him, I began to tell him about the Stanford Prison Experiment and Stanley Milgram. In the early sixties Stanley Milgram, then a social psychologist at Yale, had devised an experiment to test for the human hardwiring of obedience to authority. He gathered unsuspecting volunteers from the nearby town of New Haven, working class men, middle class women, a priest, a few students—a random enough mix—on the pretext of gathering research on how punishment affected learning. The volunteers were shown into a room with a board of electrical switches and a man in a white coat who oversaw and explained the procedure. In the next room was another man, ostensibly a volunteer, strapped into a chair. They were to ask him questions from a sheet of paper they were given and if they received a wrong answer they were to administer an electric shock to the subject. The board displayed a series of switches labeled from 15V “slight shock”; beyond 375V, “danger: severe shock”; to 450V, marked only “X X X.” With each wrong answer the subject was to receive an incremental increase of voltage.

  The subject was portrayed as a volunteer, but in fact he was in on the experiment. There was no real electricity applied to his fingertips and he had a careful script to follow. He began by producing a few wrong answers and suffering the resulting “shocks.” As the shocks increased, he acted out more and more discomfort. He yelped and cried out, then screamed, then begged to be let out of the chair, then sobbed and let it be known he had a heart condition and that he was worried, then screamed agonizingly, then went silent and eventually, at 350 volts, became inert and unresponsive.

  The purpose of the scenario was to see how far each person would agree to go along with the experiment. Most people (although not all) voiced disquiet at some point. Then they would invariably look over to the technician in the white coat and ask what they should do since the man was obviously in pain. The technician was scripted to assure the volunteer that the shocks, while undoubtedly painful, would cause no permanent tissue damage and repeat four sentences in order: “Please continue,” “The experiment requires that you continue,” “It is absolutely essential that you continue,” and, “You have no choice, you must go on.”

  In these empirical scenarios, there was no coercion, nor sanction if the subject refused to continue to shock the “learner.” The subject was told, for example, they would still receive their small stipend for participating. Over several weeks Milgram recorded that more than 60 percent of good and ordinary folk from New Haven continued to administer increasing amounts of clearly painful electric shocks, even as the subject appeared to lapse into unconsciousness, until the end of the switches and 450 volts had been delivered three times.

  Milgram tried different set-ups and conditions for the experiment: he varied the proximity between “teacher” and “learner”; he put another, more sympathetic, person in the room with the technician and the subject; he moved the whole thing away from the auspices of Yale University, in case its hallowed reputation was influencing compliance. Each variation brought a slightly different set of results. A greater percentage of people found it easier to shock the “learner” the farther away from him he was, i.e., behind a wall or in a soundproof room. If other people, “peers,” in the room also questioned the necessity of continuing the experiment then a greater percentage of volunteers refused to continue and refused to continue earlier in the process.

  Milgram found that the social context, the effect of “peers” creating a group reaction, could counteract the general determination to obey authority, but over the years the experiment has been repeated in different countries and cultures with different age and socioeconomic groups. Most people, when asked in polls, don’t believe that anyone would continue shocking a civilian “learner” just because they were told to do so by someone wearing a white coat. In fact New Haven’s 60 percent compliance rate in the experiment at Yale turned out to be, in global terms, on the low side. Philip Zimbardo, picking up on Milgram’s research in his own efforts to understand “The Lucifer Effect,” made another point. He noted that none of Milgram’s volunteers refused to do the experiment from
the beginning, all of them began the process of pushing switches which delivered increasing voltage to the “learner” and that even among the subjects who stood up and refused to continue because they felt they could not be part of something which was causing pain to another person, not one went to the aid of the shocked learner or attempted to intervene by going to higher authorities to demand that the whole experiment be stopped.

  When I read Milgram, I was very impressed with the idea that obedience to authority was a learned cognitive behavior that ran through almost every society.

  “It seems empirically clear,” I told Adnan, “that most people do what they are told for no other reason than they are told to do it.” He listened, amazed, and nodded.

  “This idea is helping me on some soul searching!”

  “I am beginning to see that perhaps Iraqis are not crazy Arabs after all—imagine!” I said laughing, “They might be just ordinary human beings!” Adnan laughed back, “Yes, but all the same, they are crazy Arabs!”

  “Solzhenitsyn said that there is a line separating good from evil that runs through every man.”

  “Yes,” said Adnan, more serious now, but uplifted, as I was, by the emerging sunlit thought that there was perhaps, a universal morality, as there was a universal condition. “Human nature is the same,” he said. “People are not good because they are taught in school to be good, there is a cultural impact over generations to make people comply, certain things are not acceptable, these norms are sanctioned under authority…Iraqis are repressed and exposed to violence; it’s not strange to see what is happening now. The Americans don’t represent authority and the Iraqis perceive them only as representing random violence.”

  He told me that two days previously his house in the safe VIP compound adjacent to the GreenZone in Baghdad had been raided by American soldiers looking for one of his men who was not there. The soldiers took laptops and documents and stole $7,000, the life savings of one of his bodyguards who had kept them in the office because he thought they would be safe there.

  “I think,” I told him, “that the Americans are no more uncivilized than the Iraqis are uncivilized.” Adnan smiled and took my hands in gratitude across the table.

  “Yes,” he agreed, tenderly holding the thought, “I think we are all the same.”

  Chapter 13

  SHAME

  ADNAN’S ELDER BROTHER, WHO HAD BEEN SHEIKH before him, was called Khalid; Kamel Sachet also had a brother named Khalid. No one ever spoke well of him. Most people dismissed him as living off his elder brother’s uniform, a marginal, inveigling, figure.

  “He drank a lot,” a Janabi Istikhbarat officer once told me, shaking his head. “He was totally unlike his brother. Khalid was crazy.”

  At the end of 1999 Khalid fled to Jordan and made a public defection, claiming he had been an officer in the Mukhabarat (according to the Janabi Istikhbarat officer he had only ever been a driver) and offering information against Saddam’s regime to the Jordanian intelligence services and Western journalists.

  One day, during a Google trawl, I idly typed the name Khalid Janabi, hoping to understand a little bit more about Adnan’s brother’s death in Rome—Adnan had information from senior figures, rumors, bits of witness and suspicion, but he didn’t like to talk about his theories—and instead came up with the transcript of an interview given by Khalid Sachet calling himself, more anonymously, by his tribal moniker, Khalid al-Janabi, to Radio Free Iraq, part of the American government’s Liberty Radio Network.

  “Khalid al-Janabi” told how he had been part of an exterminating force ordered by Qusay to kill 2,000 prisoners in Abu Ghraib in the spring of 1998 to relieve overcrowding. He recounted how the prisoners had been hanged one after another in the five execution chambers; there were so many that they delegated a group of specially designated prisoners to shoot some in a separate room. He also described in detail how the Mukhabarat blackmailed senior army officers by sexually compromising their wives and daughters.

  Khalid:…When the officer leaves the house, they go in and plant a camera in the chandelier. You know of these things of course. It is like the head of a pin called the fish’s eye, which can photograph the whole room. Or they plant a recording device, very small of course. This is very sensitive, and anything said in the room, we hear it and record it. The voice is altered. On the video, we of course see and record everything with his wife, his moves, everything. This of course when the woman goes to the house, if the [officer’s] wife goes along with it, fine. Otherwise, she is forced. We have the kidnapping operation. Her daughter leaves the house. We have a car to pick her up. We have special houses with swimming pools in Al-Jadriyeh, Al-Habbaniyah and other places. Each is prepared with a room fully loaded with video equipment. They violate the daughter if they are able to get her, or the wife, and a complete documentary is recorded. Then they tell her that they have the movie.

  Q: They tell them!

  Khalid: Yes, yes. I will tell you later how they threaten the officer. And they tell her that if she does not cooperate, they will show it to the officer and that would tell the officer that his wife is such and such and then they show him a cassette. You know, an officer whose face is covered with layers of battle dust does not submit to someone telling him his daughter called so and so! You know that we are raised on manners and honor. He does not take it. So, they keep such tapes. This process begins when the person becomes an officer until he becomes a commander.

  Q: What is the objective? What is the goal of this entire process?

  Khalid: The objective is when the person becomes an officer. When I and other officers told my brother, the general, in 1982, he of course did not believe it.

  Q: Did you tell him?

  Khalid: Yes, yes, I told him, my dear brother, true, you are in a high position and big commander, but we at the intelligence system have pulled the rug out from under your feet. He said that there is no such thing. I told him, fine, I will prove it to you. One day when I was duty officer at the Technical Branch, I pulled out a movie of one of the officers who is still in the state apparatus. I cannot tell you his name. We had a video at home and told the…general.

  Q: You mean Major General Kamel?

  Khalid: Yes, Major General Kamel Sachet, my…brother. So, I told him I wanted to show him a video. I played the tape, and he saw only a part, and told me to turn it off.

  Q: Did he see?

  Khalid: Yes, he saw the officer, the daughter, and what they did to her. This was not a matter of a composite video or any thing. The act of rape was very clear. He said turn it off.

  Khalid is not a reliable witness, but I quote this interview to illustrate the invidious techniques devised by Saddam’s regime to terrorize and marshal its own officers. There were three concentric walls built to defend the fortress of obedience. The innermost wall was crenellated with the consequences of torture, imprisonment and execution. The middle wall was built of heavy threat bricks against family members. “We will kill you whatever happens, but you can spare her by confessing,” they would tell some bloody, beaten, shocked man forced to confront the scene of his wife or sister or daughter whimpering under the black and blue grip of a squad of lascivious Amn thugs. The outer wall was made out of videotape and photographs, eavesdropped transcripts and dossiers, and was designed not to repel so much as to ensnare, and by binding and entangling, disable any further assault on the dictator-keep.

  Violation, blackmail. The disgrace of a female family member is the greatest dishonor an Iraqi can endure. The shame could stain an entire family. Sisters would be refused by eminent suitors, perhaps the best they could hope for in the shadow of a scandal would be some ugly, poor cousin willing to debase himself for a cash enticement. Brothers would be humiliated, their positions within their tribe and community compromised and sullied. It is a wound that we in the West, long unbonded from the idea of the extended family as a collective of social, financial and moral responsibility, cannot really understand. But dishonor remain
s, for many Iraqis, a nasty flesh wound, a laceration that suppurates and scars and takes a very long time, sometimes a generation or more, to heal.

  Chapter 14

  PRIDE

  ABOVE ALL KAMEL SACHET TRIED TO PROTECT his family.

  By the mid nineties, the net was closing. The Sachets’ phone was bugged—this they took for granted—and there was often a car parked outside with two men watching. When he rose early to drive to the mosque for dawn prayer an agent on a bicycle followed him. The surveillance permeated the house and kept the family under protracted strain. Sometimes the telephone would start ringing at one or two in the morning but when it was answered no one was on the line. One day all the keys to the house disappeared; they changed all the locks but it was chilling to think someone had stolen into the house to take them. Their back gate neighbors moved out and were replaced by an odd household of men who seemed to be spying on them. Kamel Sachet warned his children there were microphones in the house and informers among their close friends. Fewer visitors came and when they did there were ellipses and sideways remarks and superficial pleasantries instead of conversation. At night Kamel Sachet instituted a system of watches, just like he was on a battlefield expecting an enemy attack, so that someone in the house was always awake. It was difficult to sleep through the tension, any noise or voice would make them sit up in their beds, waiting for the knock. Um Omar suffered from headaches and insomnia.

  “I could tell by his face that he was angry,” she told me. “I said to him, why are you angry?” But he would only answer, “How do you know I am angry?” and refuse to discuss anything further. Kamel Sachet kept his face in a mask and tried to brazen it out with his self belief that was in fact only his belief in his trust in Saddam.