Atonement

Wendell Steavenson went looking for remorse among the men who served Saddam Hussein. Her fruitless search, George Packer writes, has produced one of the few lasting works to come out of the Iraq war.

The Weight of a Mustard Seed: The Intimate Story of an Iraqi General and His Family During Thirty Years of Tyranny
Wendell Steavenson
Collins
Dh80

Wendell Steavenson is the kind of writer whose work occupies the margins of ordinary journalism and outlasts it. An Anglo-American woman in her thirties, she spent the early part of the Iraq War in Baghdad, living in a cheap hotel room with a malfunctioning oven. She was a notable presence – tall, blonde, warm, but distracted by some inner intensity, and apparently not frightened, crossing a busy Baghdad street for the whole world to see at a time when foreigners were beginning to get kidnapped. While most of the press corps focused on the occupation and the growing insurgency, she pursued her own investigations into the lives of a handful of Iraqis she met by happenstance – psychiatrists, housewives, cashiered Baathists.

Steavenson’s sensibility is literary, not journalistic, and in another age she might have collected experiences for a novel, but – such is the state of writing and reading today – the major books written about the post-September 11 world have been works of narrative non-fiction, which is also Steavenson’s genre (her first book, called Stories I Stole, was about the two years she spent living in the Republic of Georgia). The Weight of a Mustard Seed has no notes or index. You will have heard of none of its characters, and Steavenson’s project suffers to some extent from the elusiveness of her subject. But the choice of material brings something new to the literature of the war: an inquiry into the life of an Iraqi man that is, at the same time, an inquiry into the nature of complicity with an evil regime. It’s about the complexity of the recent Iraqi past, not the headlines of its tormented present.

The title comes from a sura in the Quran about the scrupulousness of the justice meted out on Judgment Day, and Steavenson’s passionate obsession, pursued across five years and several world capitals, is to draw out “flickers of conscience” from members of Saddam Hussein’s regime. To push her interview subjects beyond their defensive habit of answering, “Yes, but.” To understand the motives of “the human cogs of the torture machine”, and hear one of them express a seed’s worth of remorse. Her guides are Solzhenitsyn, Arendt, Gitta Sereny (the biographer of the Nazi architect Albert Speer) and the social scientists Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, whose experiments revealed the willingness of normal human beings to inflict pain. Her assumption is that most Iraqis behaved as most human beings would have in circumstances of systematic terror, that psychology is universal and so is morality. And her investigations confirm what we’ve learnt from the 20th century’s many other nightmares: conscience is even more rare than justice. In the end, Steavenson found so little reflection and regret among her living subjects that she had to turn for redemption to a man who died over a decade ago – a cog of the torture regime who is no longer around to confirm or deny that “he was full of something that he would not have known how to call remorse”.

Kamel Sachet was a military officer who rose to the rank of lieutenant general in Saddam’s army. He showed great heroism in the early years of the Iran-Iraq War, and was favoured and rapidly promoted by Saddam. He commanded a division in Kirkuk in 1987, where he had several officers shot after a failed attack, served in the vicinity of Kurdish villages that were being destroyed in what amounted to a campaign of genocide (and was briefly hospitalised for mysterious chest pains), led the Iraqi occupation forces in Kuwait City during the Gulf War, was so disenchanted by the retreat from Kuwait in 1991 that he retired from the military, became a farmer on a piece of land south of Baghdad, was recalled to serve as the civilian governor of the southern province where the habitat and livelihood of the Marsh Arabs was being destroyed (by the army, not by him), retired again, turned to conservative Islam (some called him a Wahhabi), and devoted himself to building mosques. In December 1998, during the American bombing of Baghdad, he was arrested and executed on Saddam’s orders.

Lieutenant General Kamel Sachet was the ill-educated son of rural parents with a strong sense of tribal identity; he was a brave and conscientious soldier who came to hate what Saddam did to the army; he was also an austere, silent, loving patriarch. In every way, down to the moustache and dishdasha, his story places him as a characteristic product of the Sunni officer class during the Saddam years.

Steavenson tells this story as something more, too: the account of a man who served Saddam well until he came to regret it, and then who “tried, I believe, in his own way, to atone”. Those chest pains in 1987 might have been like the collapse from exhaustion that sent Albert Speer into the hospital in 1944 – “some kind of subconscious reaction to the stress of realising the horror”. In the southern town of Amara, Steavenson meets a man who recalls Kamel Sachet as a benevolent governor during the destruction of the marshes. His turn to an extreme form of Islam might have represented a desire to settle his accounts with God. All of this is speculation, because the book’s central character wasn’t an expressive man or important enough to leave a documentary trail, and his family became inaccessible to Steavenson halfway through her research, when the violence in Iraq made journalism there almost impossible. So The Weight of a Mustard Seed balances a large moral hope on a necessarily slight foundation of evidence.

In the end, the portrait of Kamel Sachet as a man on a moral quest for atonement is not quite convincing. The decision he took after the disastrous occupation of Kuwait, to try to extricate himself from Saddam’s menacing embrace, was at least an honourable act of refusal by a soldier who had seen the army he loved turned into the personal instrument of a tyrant’s will. But there’s no reason to believe that Sachet felt anything like the personal remorse that Steavenson pursues so doggedly in her surviving sources, who now bide their time in Abu Dhabi, Damascus, Amman and England. If Sachet had not been killed, and Steavenson had managed to sit him down for the story of his life, he may not have sounded very different from the old Baathist General Raad Hamdani, who wards off every hard question about his own conduct with the retort, “You cannot understand what it is like to live under such a regime!”

Sachet tried to withdraw from the regime, but not from the code of honour that required summary battlefield executions, a life of crushing isolation for two daughters and a religious belief that amounted to another kind of extremism. His conscience as a soldier, which everyone who knew him recognised and admired, existed within very narrow limits, and it’s unlikely that these included any sense of culpability for the towering crimes of Saddam’s regime. Dishonour and guilt are far from the same thing, and in some circumstances the first is an obstacle to the second.

I interviewed many former Baathists and military officers in Iraq, and not a single one of them ever acknowledged any personal moral responsibility. Denunciations of Saddam came easily, but so did the kind of rationalisations that Steavenson heard again and again: they did what they did because they had to, out of fear, to protect their family, to eat and survive. When I asked about the gassing of Kurdish villagers, it was common to hear flat denials that it had ever happened.

This mental atmosphere of evasion and excuse was made worse by the fact that these same former officials and officers were now living under American power, which gave them an easy way to change the subject from committing old crimes to having new ones committed against them. They had been victims under Saddam, and now they were victims under the Americans: this was the extent of moral consciousness among most of the former ruling class in post-Saddam Iraq. The occupation and insurgency forestalled any chance for Iraqis to begin to reckon with their individual and collective roles as accomplices, as well as victims, during Saddam’s reign of terror. This is why the writer Kanan Makiya’s project for a memorial museum and archive in the centre of Baghdad, where the crossed swords of Saddam’s Victory Monument stand, had little chance of being established so soon after the fall of the regime, and indeed seemed to infuriate most Iraqis who knew about it.

“There were varying shades of hypocrisy and after a while the faces and the excuses and the old war stories blurred into each other, the former general became a type,” Steavenson writes. “I liked them, I joked with them, I sympathised with them. But not one ever looked me straight in the eye and admitted responsibility for the crimes of the government which they had served.” Her search for Kamel Sachet led her to Iraqis the reader might find more interesting and more revealing: Dr. Hassan al Qadhani, an army psychiatrist who briefly shared a prison cell with Sachet in the late eighties, who accurately diagnosed the regime’s effects on himself and others, and who introduced Steavenson to Sachet’s family; the general’s favourite daughter, Shadwan, living in the darkness of her father’s shadow, and his sons, trying to live up to his example by joining the insurgency without seeing that they were destroying their country; a former sergeant named Mohammed, who held onto his humanity during the Iraqi pillage of Kuwait and later said of Kamel Sachet, “He was just like the others”; and Adnan al Janabi, the reluctant sheikh of Sachet’s tribe, who became Steavenson’s wisest interlocutor. These last two bear the least guilt and, not coincidentally, see the clearest.

There’s nothing very surprising about this. How many German officers were prepared to admit their own responsibility when the contents of the death camps were revealed at the end of the Second World War? How many Soviet or East German officials have written self-incriminating memoirs? Which former Khmer Rouge killer has expressed remorse at the current Cambodian genocide trials? Steavenson quotes the question that Albert Speer’s daughter posed to Gitta Sereny: “How can he admit more and go on living?” Perhaps it will take another generation or two before Iraqis can begin to face the past without justification or fear – and even that will depend in part on the quality of Iraq’s new leadership.

The missing flicker of conscience at the core of Kamel Sachet’s story does not represent a failure on Steavenson’s part. On the contrary, her exploration of his life will be one of the few lasting works to come out of the war. Her descriptive skills beautifully evoke the world of Saddam’s officers, formerly so ambitious and hard and cowed, now living out their trivial days smoking and making cellphone calls in the coffee shops of the Arab world. And her moral seriousness has transformed their story into the latest instalment in the literature of modern evil. Steavenson saw the first year after the American invasion as intimately as any other foreigner in Iraq, but in the chaos of the present her writerly instinct guided her to look for deeper truths in the already forgotten past.

George Packer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq. His next book, Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade, will be published in the fall.