Missing from much of the Western literature of the Iraq War is an understanding of Iraqis as human beings, of what it meant to struggle under Saddam Hussein’s regime, and what the daily battle to maintain one’s moral equilibrium entailed. Some observers have been deeply committed to the plight of innocent Iraqis – George Packer’s “Assassin’s Gate,” for example, draws a picture of a trembling post-invasion Iraq further poisoned by sectarian violence. Too often though, Iraqis – track-suited gunmen, mustachioed Baathists, and burqa-clad women – register as bit players in a larger American drama, one concerned with questions about imperial overreach, George W. Bush, the clash of civilizations, and liberalism’s confrontation with totalitarianism.
Wendell Steavenson’s “The Weight of a Mustard Seed,” is an extraordinary book about Iraqis that begins to fill this void. Stevenson, a freelance journalist who reported on the Iraq war for the Observer, Slate and the New Yorker (her previous book, “Stories I Stole” is about her time spent reporting from the Republic of Georgia), tells the story of war hero General Kamel Sachet, his family and their thirty-year entanglement with Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party.
Steavenson’s portrait of Sachet, constructed from interviews with family, friends and associates in several countries, explores his inner life in the years before his assassination by Saddam’s henchmen in 1998. Prideful, brave, and admired, he is tormented, she tells us, caught between his loyalty to his country and waning illusions about the criminal regime he serves. He is an exemplar of the men found within totalitarian regimes that are in Steavenson’s words “simultaneously cowed and exalted,” many in Iraq the uneducated sons of illiterate farmers whose identity depends on a uniform and a gun. Finally, Sachet becomes a prism that refracts questions about human nature and its capacity to both deliver and submit to cruelty. In this sense, the book stands in the tradition of Hannah Arendt, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, and Arthur Koestler. Most importantly, Steavenson is concerned with individual lives of those who dealt violence and the forces under which they lived.
Steavenson’s writes literary journalism with a novelist’s heart. The book, interspersed with descriptions of photographs in place of the images themselves, immediately places us in the expectant chaos of post-Saddam Iraq. Take for example the following passage, worth quoting at some length:
In August the 133 degree sun switched off at dusk and the baked concrete of the city radiated into the evening. Not a cooling darkness, no puff of wind, but respite enough to venture outside, stretch your legs, sit in a café, sticky- necked in the furnace heat wreathed in kebab smoke…The shops cascaded pent-up imports onto the sidewalks: satellite dishes, electric fans, mobile phones, tinsel, gold painted chandeliers, strings of multi-colored fairy lights, cherry glitter lipstick, leopard print lingerie, pink dolls for daughters and plastic kalashnikovs for sons…we drove through the shopping throng, ignored the gunshot that might have been a car backfiring except that it was really a gunshot, past the tract of waste ground, right at the half-built mosque, raw and gray under redundant construction cranes past a small abandoned police post; wove between a palm trunk chicane, a ball of tumbleweed razor wire and a pool of emerald sewage into an unassuming street of small villas with walled front gardens.
Soon the hopeful expectancy of a new order turns again to pervasive fear. After a car bomb goes off near her hotel the journalists go out for a walk and remark “what a funny irony it was that the deranged atmosphere of a car bomb aftermath could provide respite from the usual unease.” We learn telling details, for example, that the poison gas used to massacre the Kurds in the Anfal campaign smelled of apples and garlic.
Kamel Sachet was a military officer from humble origins who rose within Hussein’s ranks to become a General. Distinguishing himself in the Iran-Iraq War, Sachet, who for a time suffered inexplicable chest pains – Steavenson draws a parallel between with Nazi architect Albert Speer who suffered a protracted ailment thought to be psycho-semantic – led Hussein’s forces in Kuwait and struggled to maintain order and rectitude among an Iraqi army that had become a font of corruption, murder, and rape. For his success he was rewarded with money, cars, and a farmhouse. Just as quickly he was denounced as a traitor and imprisoned. Some of his fellow prisoners were affixed to wooden benches by a nail through the ear. By caprice he was brought back into the fold and promoted.
Sachet became Governor of the remote marshland region (Saddam set the marshes afire as retribution for an uprising following the first Gulf War; the fires were so great they could be seen from space) and atoned – Steavenson tells us – first by becoming the custodian of a long-forgotten leper colony, devoting himself to Islam, and by building and maintaining a mosque. Sachet, Steavenson informs us, held the hands of hospital patients while whispering to himself “ten credits,” points toward some cosmic quota of redemption.
Steavenson’s states her task plainly: “It was this disquiet I was searching for, these flickers of conscience. This army, as instrument of the regime, did monstrous things but was made up of ordinary men who did not seem monsters to me nor that abstracted and overwrought Hollywood word, ‘evil.’…How do ordinary little human cogs make up a torture machine?” Steavenson refers to the psychological studies of Philip Zimbardo and Stanley Millman which showed that ordinary people have the capacity to torture, to behave with abject cruelty. The exiled Generals in the cafes of Amman and Damscus, the middle-aged men with dyed-mustaches and “chunky” expensive watches deliver a similar refrain when Steavenson presses them, admirably, on their complicity: “What could I do?”
They have a point. Steavenson expertly diagrams the webs of fear spun by Hussein – from his initial purge in which he forced Baath party members to shoot their colleagues under threat of death to the video-taped rapes of the daughters of his officer corps. To oppose Hussein was to sign your death warrant and that of your family.
Steavenson is not an apologist for totalitarianism or a proponent of moral equivalency; in interviews she is unafraid to press powerful men on the terror they inflicted on the defenseless. It is unnerving in the end however just how few, if any, admit to wrongdoing, who show the same evidence of moral culpability that she places within the conscience and person of Kamel Sachet, how many in fact betray what Steavenson calls that “flicker of conscience.”
