The Weight of a Mustard Seed (10 page)

After a few days a warrant officer brought him news that his family was safe at a relative's house in Diala and that his son Osama was with them, but that his other son, Ahmed, was missing and there were rumors that he had been killed or wounded in the battle for the airport road. Hamdani put on a
dishdasha
and borrowed the ID card of a man who looked roughly like him and went to look in Baghdad.

He hardly knew where to begin, everything was broken and in chaos. He searched in different areas. “Where can you look? But you are a father so you must look.” He walked the airport highway through the burnt tanks and Humvees and he wondered why the Americans had not imposed more control, why there was not even a curfew? The roads from the South were lined with makeshift graves, heaped earth or white sheets, each marked with a stake. The weather was hot and dusty and there were streams of poor people walking home. An American private, wilting and exhausted from the sun beating, held up a stretcher he had made into a sign painted with the word “Dead” so that the people walking would not step on the fresh graves. Hamdani saw every pathetic mound as his dead son, the American private holding up the sign in the heat and the dust, asking the herding people to go around, struck him as some surreal polite detail in all the mess.

Finally after several days and relayed messages from the
family in Diala, Hamdani got word that one of his relatives had found a note in the admissions book of a hospital in the Adhamiya district of Baghdad: “
Ahmed: 2nd Lt. Rep. Gd.
”

Ahmed had taken three bullets on the airport road, two through his upper thigh and one through his bicep. He lay bleeding, unable to walk, next to a corporal who was slowly dying, when an American medic came up the road and crouched down to examine them. The dying corporal reached up a little and whispered for help, “I am a Christian like you!” and he fingered the gold cross around his neck. The American medic told him his name was David and said a few prayers as the corporal died. The medic said he would try to stay with Ahmed too, “Because you wear glasses and I wear glasses just like yours,” but soon his unit was moved forward and he went away. Then a Republican Guard officer came out of a hiding place and dragged Ahmed, hitching car to car, until they reached the hospital in Adhamiya. There a doctor cleaned his wounds but they had no bed for him, so the Republican Guard officer took Ahmed to his own house, which was nearby. A relative tracked him down and by the time Hamdani got back to his family in Diala, Ahmed was already there, splayed and pale, tended by a local nurse (they did not dare entrust him to a hospital) being fed with antibiotics and broth.

After another week or so passed, Hamdani went to Baghdad to see if there was any remnant of the high command to which he should report. He found his former colleagues and friends too scared to sleep in their own houses. There were Americans looking for the deck of playing cards, Chalabi's militia in their American uniforms, Kurdish
Peshmerga
in baggy pantaloons requisitioning ministerial houses, the Badr Brigade guarding bridges. Thousands of Shia were on the roads walking to the
shrine of Kerbala for the anniversary of the death of the martyr Hussein, performing a pilgrimage so long forbidden. They walked past burned government buildings still picked over by looters and the wreckage of his tank units on the south highway and Hamdani could see very clearly that everything was going to be different now.

Hamdani stayed for a few days at his mother's house and found an army medic he knew to go to Diala and take care of Ahmed because they were worried about gangrene. He was afraid at first to return to his own house and kept moving every few nights in case he was recognized, but after a few weeks Hamdani was tired of hiding and so with the help of some neighbors he managed to evict a family of squatters who had taken over his house and moved back in.

On the street he saw the faces of thieves and murderers and so he shut himself indoors and lapsed into depression. By the beginning of June, the American net was closing, his name was on the blacklist of the 200 most wanted. Helicopters seemed to hover exactly over his house, Humvee patrols seemed more frequent. His wife begged him to turn himself in, but he was reluctant. Eventually he was put in touch with a Mukhabarat officer exile, who said he had been under his command in 1983 together with Qusay and Uday (Hamdani couldn't remember him) and that he was now working with the Americans and could arrange for him to turn himself in safely.

So he surrendered himself to the Americans and agreed to co-operate. He was treated well and allowed to go home every night and sleep in his own bed. Once his house was stormed by American troops at night, he and his wife and daughters were bundled into the garden illuminated by the bright helicopter light above and handcuffed before he could explain that there
had obviously been a mix-up and that he had already turned himself in. For several months, he went every day to be debriefed. He told them he would answer every question and that he would answer them truthfully. In his interrogations he was interviewed by different officers, historians, analysts and intelligence. Some focused on WMD and their whereabouts, others wanted him to explain the structure of the Iraqi army, others had more strategic questions about the relationship between Saddam Hussein and the Republican Guard and how decisions were made. The Americans, he acknowledged, treated him well and with courtesy. Hamdani could not resist a self-serving comment on the increasingly cordial atmosphere of these discussions. “Even in custody I told the Americans that they would lose. They hated me at first for saying this but now the new staff is coming to Amman to talk to me.”

 

I
N MANY WAYS
Hamdani conformed to the way most generals and senior commanders reflected on the past twenty-five years of their combat careers. Iran was an enemy that deserved to be attacked. Gas was (regrettably) used for reasons of expediency, the Anfal campaigns were more of the order of counter-insurgency measures than genocide, the invasion of Kuwait was a monumental blunder of Saddam's hubris, the uprising that followed was Iranian backed, the nineties were years of corruption and stagnation and they had come to hate Saddam and his destruction of the army and the country in its wake. Yes, but.

Culpability. Moral Responsibility.

After several days of conversation, after the whole history had been laid out on his desk and illustrated with lines of blue
ballpoint and flashes of gesticulation, I asked Hamdani directly about his own sense of guilt and morality and how he justified to himself having served a terror regime.

At first he reiterated how terrible Saddam had been. “Yes,” I concurred, “but you were his general.”

Then he understood what I was asking and he leaned across his desk to look at me directly, intensely, eye to eye. I met his gaze and we stared at each other for a minute or so. I looked as carefully as I could into his eyes but could discern no tremulous depth. Perhaps there was something sealed, farther back, behind—but I began to be uncomfortable and I looked away so that he had won the staring match and was able to ramble his final, concluding thoughts. I wrote them down just as he spoke them; I cannot vouch for their sincerity or veracity.

“You feel very sad, the high command was gone, it was the stupidity of our own decisions combined with the stupidity of American decisions. You feel very sad about what Iran will gain, the destruction of the country and a civil war I told my debriefers I hoped I would not live to see—

“…The idea of participating—it's much bigger than what you are capable of understanding. I graduated from military college, a new regime came…It's not easy. The mistakes were not only Saddam Hussein's mistakes. It was the mistake of a whole society, it was a mountain that grew, stacked up. How much could you change it? At the time it was a very bad system, a bad regime, but there were red lines, if you didn't cross the red lines you were OK. But now? Now it's nothing: why am I out of Iraq now? I never would have left Iraq, but it has become worse, I had to…It kept piling up, there were more and more restraints. As a good commander, as a good person, what can you do? I tried to lessen the evil in the
regime. I worked to correctly bring up good honorable soldiers to perform for their country, not for the regime. You carry out an order, but in a good way to obliterate the evil in it. I was never a tool in killing. I never killed another Iraqi, I never killed an Iranian prisoner of war, I never attacked a Kurdish village when I was part of the forces in the North. This was as much as I could do. A human being is held accountable according to the amount of freedom he gets. Who would dare to object to his plans? Or say he would lose this war? I set ninety percent of the deserters in my units free. I did not even have a jail at my division headquarters. I did not have bodyguards, it was just me and my driver. Qusay and Saddam Hussein were always criticizing me for this. And I would always answer them by asking if there was any problem in the fighting capability of my division, or their training or preparations. I had no jail but I had the best battalions in fighting skills and power.” Here his pride expanded and he quoted von Manstein's
Soldiers' Memoir
, “The greatest status you reach in the military and its highest rank is to be an excellent soldier. I wished to end my career being an excellent soldier.”

“You chose to be a part of it,” I told him. “You could have resigned, you could have gone to live in the country like your cousin.”

“One of my American debriefers asked me the same question. He asked me why I continued to fight against the Americans. I told him it had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein. It's hard for you to understand, but it was a matter of military honor, being part of a country and within that comes your loyalty to your high command. I asked the American debriefer, ‘Why are you in my country asking me this question?' He replied, ‘I am under orders.' I told him, ‘I was also under orders.' I asked him,
‘Do you like President Bush?' He admitted he did not. ‘So,' I asked him, ‘Why did you carry out his orders?'”

 

A
FTER EIGHT YEARS,
the war against Iran finally came to an end in 1988. Zaid, Kamel Sachet's youngest son, put another video in the machine for me to watch.

A
HMED, KAMEL SACHET AND UM OMAR'S MIDDLE
son, had delicate bones and a beautiful face. His dark eyes were limpid like unfathomable pools of poetry, his long glossy lashes blinked like Bambi, but he held himself carefully; he wore clean well-pressed
dishdashas
buttoned at his throat or a neat pair of jeans and a black sweater. No gesture was superfluous or excited, his hands kept still. His rosebud mouth delineated calm certitude.

An explosion boomed the window glass.

Ahmed smiled a pretty line of perfect white teeth: “Like music to us.”

Ahmed had been five when the war against Iran ended; it was one of his earliest memories. His father had put him in the car and they had driven up Abu Nawas Street, along the banks of the river, by the strip of park and open air fish restaurants. He remembered fireworks, great red and green starbursts like sparkling magical chrysanthemums. Shopkeepers were distributing sweets to passers-by, rich men hired musicians to play in front gardens; there were parties and all over town kids would douse those who walked past with buckets of water, hauling honking motorists out of their cars to drench them in the great
Baghdad water fight. Gunfire cracked in celebration for days—Saddam had to go on television and ask people to calm their exuberance because too many people were getting injured by stray bullets. Ahmed remembered his father, touched by the excitement, firing his pistol in the air out of the car window. Ahmed never saw him do anything as spontaneous or as delighted as that again. Eight years! And the war was over.

 

“L
ADIES AND GENTLEMEN:
We got him.”

In December 2003 the Americans found Saddam in a hole. Wild-haired, grimy, bearded, defeated, his sons killed, his country occupied. Iraqis watched an American army doctor probe his mouth, look inside his ears and check his hair as if for fleas. These were the only images released. They provoked a strange mixture of fascination and umbrage. In some way Saddam's humiliation seemed to resonate in many Iraqi hearts. I heard, even from the mouths of his tortured victims, “This is not the way to treat him, after all, he was our president.”

Gunfire erupted, inevitably,
ratttatattatata
all over the city; mixed outrage and celebration. The Sachets were all very happy and their house hummed with satisfaction. Um Omar smiled broadly and told me that Ali, always the impetuous one, had wanted to get the gun and fire it in the air but she and his sisters had restrained him.

“No no! Don't fire your gun or the Americans will arrest you!”

Ali pretended to look sheepish, but we all laughed about it. I teased them that gunfire expressed all Iraqi emotion: celebration for weddings and beating the Kuwaitis in soccer, frustration in traffic jams, anger, warning, joy for the birth of a son…

They politely pretended to laugh with me as Ahmed came into the room and touched his hand to his breast in greeting. It was Ramadan and they were fasting. Ahmed looked a little drawn from his religious exertion. Yes, it was a matter of celebration that Saddam had been captured, but he could not thank the Americans for it. The occupation was a national humiliation.

“When I see an American I want to kill them myself,” said Um Omar, without losing the kindliness in her voice.

“Perhaps if we kill them they will go away,” Shadwan hoped.

For Ahmed the Iraqi police were the same as the Americans. The police were collaborators with the occupiers and betrayed the names of the
mujahideen
.

“They deserve to die more than the Americans,” said Ahmed; treachery was worse than occupation. “They are helping the oppressor.”

Ahmed was studying at a religious college and he rose every morning for dawn prayer and to read the Koran. He told me he could not choose a favorite
surah
because all its verses were perfect. The Koran was all knowledge, law and prophecy, the sum of history and future, God's incarnate word, entire and complete. Ahmed's big brown eyes shone with its beauty. He memorized a little more of the great book every day. At night he dreamed of his father, and in his dreams his father was wearing his uniform and exhorting him, paternal and firm, to learn the Koran as he himself had always wanted to, because in the Koran there was peace. “The point is to show the Koran is right,” Ahmed told me. “It is ahead of us. Everything is already written in the Koran, and then we discover it.”

 

A
HMED HAD NOT
been a good student when he was a boy, mathematics was complicated for him. He remembered his father testing him from his Arabic textbook and becoming furious with his wrong answer. Ahmed, in retelling, shuddered at his father's authority. Another time, Ahmed told his father he was going to do something “tomorrow.” Kamel Sachet told him no, he should always say
inshallah
, God willing, when he spoke about the future. This stricture seemed to Ahmed as integral as the authority that had delivered it.

“When he told you to do something, there was no now or later, you did it immediately. It was like a military order. If you hadn't done anything wrong, it was fine, but if you had done something wrong—well, I didn't want to sit next to him if I had done something wrong.”

When he was ten or eleven Ahmed went to summer school at the mosque and began learning the Koran. For Ahmed the mosque was a clean slate. He found he was good at learning the
surahs
and he noticed that when he talked about the mosque his father paid him more attention; from time to time, when he correctly recited a
surah
, there came down a nod of approval. He asked his father if he could be sent to religious school for secondary education and his father agreed.

As Ahmed grew up his ambition was to become an imam, to advise people about Islam and to answer their questions.

No, Ahmed shook his head, he was not interested in traveling.

“Perhaps to Mecca?”

Ahmed nodded solemnly.

“
Inshallah
.”

During Ramadan Ahmed was at home more often and sev
eral times when I came he sat with me and we discussed differences in belief. East and West, believer and infidel. Ahmed smiled. “Everyone has their different opinion and we respect it. But one of us is wrong!” Ahmed liked to talk to me about his faith and the example of Mohammed. I had a thousand questions about heaven and pork and women and
jihad
; Ahmed always had an answer. Islam was as clear to him as a crystal pool in paradise.

A day or two after Saddam was captured, after a few pro Saddam demonstrations in Adhamiya had been broken up by the Americans, I asked him:

“What did they teach you in religious school?”

“They taught us that we should say
salaam
, peace, to everyone, no matter who they were. They taught us that we should forgive someone who had harmed you.”

“But this is difficult.”

“Yes, even in the Koran it is written that not everyone can have this kind of patience.”

“Do you hate Saddam?”

“Yes, I still hate him.”

“Should you hate him? Or should you forgive him?”

“Forgiveness means that if he fell into my arms I would not kill him. I don't care what happens to him now.”

“What about the Americans?”

“Ah, with the Americans, it's different.” Ahmed said that those who came as fighters should be fought.

“But it means only more death, as if death could wipe out anger or right a wrong—”

“Do you mean revenge?” Ahmed asked me.

“Yes, perhaps, revenge.”

“It goes back to our roots, to the Arabs before Islam. If you kill my brother I will have to kill you. My conscience would
not let me live while you lived. Mohammed put rules around these traditions. In Islam if you kill my brother I cannot kill you. The government should kill you and take my revenge for me. There are three choices: I can either go to the government and tell them you have killed my brother, or I can agree to accept blood money from you, or I can forgive you.”

“Which option does Mohammed most strongly recommend?”

“If it is an accident the best thing to do is to forgive; but if a murder happens in a criminal way, you cannot forgive those murderers who kill others. In fact you will prevent more deaths by killing them.”

“So what is an accidental death, when is it alright to kill? Why is it acceptable to blow up the Red Cross?”

“
Jihad
, you know, is only permitted against other fighters. But these bombs—it depends who's inside the building.”

“It's often a mixture: Iraqis and foreigners.”

“Well, if there is an American VIP in a hotel and he is staying the night there, maybe there are other innocent people in the hotel, but in this case it is OK to kill innocent people so that you don't lose the opportunity to kill the American. Perhaps you kill twenty innocent people, but if the American VIP was not killed he would kill a thousand innocent people.”

“Is this written in the Koran?”

“In the Koran it doesn't say you can kill innocent people to achieve your goal. But each Islamic leader has his own group and his own view; he takes it from the Koran. Maybe it is right and maybe it is wrong.”

“But the Koran is very definite about war and how to manage war. How can different interpretations be allowed?”

Ahmed had certainty. His eyes shone with the clarity of his mission and his smooth brown brow never knitted at my re
calcitrance. His fingers were elegant and slender and he would gently press their tips together to define a certain emphasis or to gesticulate frustration. Every question had an answer, the answer was revealed through God and Ahmed kept his patience while explaining such obvious truth to me.

“The Koran is detailed about
jihad
. These differences in application are not very large. In the end it is only about how they achieve their goals and the Koran leaves some things to individual assessment.”

“But surely killing innocent people has definite parameters? Israelis on buses are not fighters.”

“Israel is different. The Israelis came and lived in our land, there are no innocent Israelis when a Palestinian suicide bomber blows up a bus.”

“But suicide is
haram
!”

“Suicide is a sin, yes. But
jihad
is a special case. A suicide bomber is exploding himself but he is benefiting his religion.”

“Do you think he is benefiting his religion in the eyes of the rest of the world?”

“Let them have their opinions! He is going to heaven as the highest rank of martyr.”

“So what did you think about September 11th?”

Ahmed blinked. “The attacks on New York?”

“Yes. When the two great buildings were destroyed.”

“Yes, it was
jihad
.” Ahmed smiled. “I was very happy.”

“But why
jihad
against America?”

“As long as it is attacking any Muslim country there can be
jihad
against America.”

“But what Muslim country was it attacking in 2001?”

“Many different countries.” Ahmed insisted. “But especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina, they slaughtered most of them.”

I patiently explained that America had not slaughtered
Bosnian Muslims and had in fact defended Kosovar Muslims against the Serbs. Again, I asked Ahmed directly: so where was America attacking Muslims in 2001?

Ahmed bent his answer in a different direction. “It fights Islam in an indirect way. I don't know exactly. But America puts pressure on Muslims. It's a lot of countries. Specifically I don't know.”

“So were there innocents killed in New York?”

“If it is true that al-Qaeda did this then it is a very big hit to the American economy.”

“Ahmed,” I told him, bit of Western superior fact between my teeth, “it didn't make any real difference to the American economy!”

Ahmed's logic twisted again.

“They say al-Qaeda hit it but I personally think it was the Americans themselves. Those two planes made a huge media propaganda against terrorists. After that, they could attack any Muslim country under the cover of freeing a terrorist nation. Afghanistan. Iraq.”

 

A
T THE END
of 2002 I was working in Tehran, living in the heart of Bush's axis of evil and watching, with my semi-legal satellite receiver (and an amused smile at the surreality of juxtaposition), Fox News ratchet the rhetoric for war in Iraq. I went to the poorer districts in southern Tehran and talked to Iraqi exiles—almost all Shia—who had fled Saddam's terror and I went across the border to Iraqi Kurdistan and listened to the stories of the Anfal, chemical attacks, razed villages and mass graves. Every Iraqi story was a tortured horror. Old men lifted up their
dishdashas
to show me the circular scars of manacles around their ankles; toothless women described watching their
sons being dragged away by soldiers, their houses burned; the Kurds told me that the gas smelled like apples and garlic, that it burned their lungs and that they had held their children in their arms as they died.

I was naïve then. Saddam was a bad ruler who repressed and killed his own people and, if force were needed to get rid of him, I thought, like Ahmed's innocent bystanders, this was probably a price worth paying. I believed in the principles and assumptions that I had grown up with, half American, half Brit, a mix of decency, might, right and democracy. In Iraqi Kurdistan, in March 2003, waiting for war, I watched Tony Blair argue, impassioned and with full moral fervor, the case for invasion in front of parliament. I watched Colin Powell detail intelligence on weapons of mass destruction at the UN. I believed in my governments, not literally, but I believed they were the good guys.

When the war came I went to the Kurdish North, where there was not so much mayhem: mostly we watched the Americans bomb the Iraqi front lines while we waited for Baghdad to fall. When the statue of Saddam was pulled down it was the signal for Mosul and Kirkuk to follow suit. We drove across the internal border into the husk of post-Saddam, along with thousands of Kurds over-excited to be reunited with relatives, pillaging weapons stocks and trashing whatever Baathie symbols, police stations, offices they could find.