Books and Arts; Book Review;Iraq under Saddam；Only obeying orders；

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

Why did so many apparently decent Iraqis serve Saddam Hussein so loyally for so many years? An American-British reporter, Wendell Steavenson, has interviewed a score or more of Iraqi soldiers, from sergeants to generals, trawling through their life histories to find an answer. In particular, she befriends the family of a brave general, Kamel Sachet Aziz al-Janabi, delving into his life story through his wife, several of his nine children and numerous friends and admirers.

Only later does the reader discover that he was one of countless Iraqis executed by Saddam, for reasons that never become clear, in his case only a few years before the Americans toppled the dictator. General Sachet emerges as a fundamentally honest and upright, though occasionally ruthless and intellectually limited, soldier who turns to religion, like so many other Iraqis, as the regime putrefies. His family is battered. Though its members have every cause to celebrate Saddam's demise, most of them sympathise with—and some of them actively support—the anti-American insurgency that was still rife as this book went to print.

Ms Steavenson seeks to examine the inner lives of other Iraqi military men. She relentlessly tracks them down to their abodes of exile in Abu Dhabi, Amman, Beirut, Damascus and London. After a while, there is a dispiritingly drab sameness about their stories. In short, you had to lie to survive. Perhaps the most honest in his reflections is a doctor who became a senior officer in the medical corps. “You had to lie against your principles. You had to say things you did not believe. It was mental conflict. To live 35 years like this. It becomes a personality trait.”

All those interviewed have tales of horror. Just about all of them witness summary executions: of enemy soldiers (mainly Iranians), of Kurds, of Kuwaitis, of Iraqi deserters, of senior Iraqi officers who are deemed to have been guilty of losing battles or even merely of retreating when they should have stayed to fight and die. General Sachet is ordered to oversee such executions. A sergeant witnesses an Iraqi, who was alleged to have abused a woman in Kuwait, hauled up by a crane to be shot by fellow Iraqi soldiers. The same happens to an Iraqi colonel caught smuggling gold. Kuwaiti prisoners have their ears nailed to a plank of wood.

A former bodyguard of Saddam's describes, admiringly, how he saw the dictator taking out his revolver and “shooting between the eyes” one of his own relatives who had taken a younger wife and had rejected the president's request to go back to his original one. A relation of General Sachet tells how Qusay Saddam Hussein, the dictator's son, gave an order to kill 2,000 prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison (which became notorious for abuses during the early years of the American occupation) to relieve overcrowding.

Perhaps most dispiriting of all, virtually none of those interviewed acknowledges responsibility for what was done. Most of their explanations are variations on “we were only obeying orders”. “What could I do?” “But I helped people, many people!” “I suffered also, you know.” “This was usual then.” The gassing of 5,000 Kurds in Halabja was, concedes a seemingly upright general, “a political mistake”.

“I liked them. I joked with them. I sympathised with them,” writes Ms Steavenson. “But not one ever looked me straight in the eye and admitted responsibility for the crimes of the government which they had served.” Even after the depredations of Saddam Hussein, many of those Ms Steavenson talked to still hankered after someone like him. Iraqis, says one, are “an unruly mass of shirugi—slang for thick-headed Marsh Arabs—who need the rule of the rod, a strongman, to control them.” Judging by this remorselessly bleak account of Iraq's moral collapse, one cannot but feel squeamish about Iraq's future, under any regime.