The Weight of a Mustard Seed (8 page)

Whether this is what happened, or some approximation, is not perhaps as important as the idea of this episode as a template for the war, and for Kamel Sachet's place in it, that followed. Seif Said was the first Iranian attack of the war, the first Iraqi defeat (the Iranians maintained a force at Seif Said until the end of the war in 1988 and when they left, they withdrew unilaterally), and the first battle in which commanders were shot for failure. Thereafter, battles were often pointlessly bloody, directed by orders that could never be questioned and the death bullet could come from in front or from behind. For Kamel Sachet and officers like him, the threat of execution was a deep imprint of fear twinned with the mercy and reprieve of Saddam. After Seif Said, Kamel Sachet would trust in his president and for a while this trust would serve his career well.

 

H
AMDANI AND
I talked over several days in his office in Amman, where he was doing some kind of consultancy work for a rich Iraqi exile. He drew maps for me in blue ballpoint, arrows, attacks, lines of trenches, and answered his phone to
take calls from various Iraqis and Iraq players who were revolving around the Baghdad-Amman-Damascus-Beirut-Washington circuit: Ayad Allawi, former Iraqi president appointed by the Americans, canvassing support for a rerun, the commander of the American marines in Anbar province who wanted advice, a cousin of the Iraqi foreign minister who wanted to talk about a new Kurdish political party—such was the exile's coffee-tea dance of meetings. Hamdani was always very solicitous and apologized for these interruptions and would resume drawing the troop formations at the third battle of Shalamche or a diagram of the Iranian fortifications of Fish Lake and explain how the tank battles in Fao opened up the front or why Penjawin was strategic….

The Iran-Iraq war was a long term meat grinder. It was also, for the Iraqis, a total war, much more so than for the Iranians, who fielded an army out of triple the population. All of Iraqi society was militarized in the national effort.

Pupils and teachers dressed in scout uniforms every Thursday and saluted an Iraqi flag in the playground, there were veteran battalions and schoolboy battalions, even women's battalions, and policemen were sent to the front once a year so that they might be exposed to the fight as the infantry were. An officer was respected as a brave patriot, and went to the head of the queue, Republican Guards were well paid and when they were deployed in convoy the streets were lined with children throwing water and sweets and saluting them. Even babies were dressed in the camouflage fatigues and rank of their fathers and Saddam proclaimed them “sons of our soldiers.” A former general once told me, with the boom of proud nostalgia, “We were 27 million Iraqis and 27 million soldiers.”

And with the long war came the undertow of prolonged and hopeless fighting. Some soldiers cut their wrists or shot their
feet, many relaxed in a Valium fug (the Iranians had opium to forget the pain and numb sense into courage), officers would go into battle drunk to stop themselves from shaking or “turning yellow” and some took refuge in their religion, the superstition and calming rituals of Islam warded off the horror, gave it a mysterious purpose and promised paradise.

Hamdani did not fall in with such palliatives. He seems to have retained his own independent self. He watched the summary executions on the front lines and adjudged:
yes
, on the positive side it meant that a soldier would prefer to be killed by the enemy than be labeled a coward and his family receive no pension, so positions were more ruthlessly defended,
but
the negative aspect was that there were always more losses than was necessary—“Of course to shoot a solider was a disgusting thing, a horrendous thing, any officer trained in the right way would refuse such a thing.”

I asked him about his own experience, as commander and commanded. He replied, “It's a very touchy subject,” and then he repeated that he had taught himself from books the British model of officer behavior and that this had always brought him trouble. “This was the pressure I felt, but I couldn't unlearn the British way. So I went in the middle.
Yes
,…
but
.” He attempted a smile to accompany his catchphrase and drew his analysis upright again. Command at gunpoint: it meant, he explained, that the new generation of commanders would always wait for a written order before they carried out any maneuver. This hesitancy became a feature of Iraqi command, officers were afraid to take responsibility, they waited for orders, insisted on clarifying positions, telephoned the high command—“This killed the spirit of the Iraqi army,” rued Hamdani. Many, he said, chose to die a hero's death rather than retreat tactically and be castigated as a coward. Kamel Sachet, accord
ing to Hamdani, suffered the same hesitancy. He was undoubtedly a courageous and excellent soldier, but not very well read, and not much given to debate or thoughtfulness. Hamdani believed, watching his career progress, listening to the staff officers gossip, that for Kamel Sachet, the risks of responsibility weighed as treacherously heavy as the fear of defeat.

 

K
AMEL
S
ACHET PUT
his trust in God, his president and his own prowess. On his release from prison in 1983 he was sent to Penjawin in the Kurdish mountains, where the Iraqis held positions on the high jagged-tooth promontories. Anxious to prove himself, he would challenge his fellow officers when they went on foot to inspect high forward positions. Although he was still weak from his incarceration he always arrived first.

The following year at the battle of Fish Lake (more of a filthy canal) in the desert outside Basra, Colonel Kamel Sachet drove his jeep to the front line where the Iranians were dug in 100 meters away and the bullets fell like rain and calmly sat and asked for tea to be brewed. The battle lasted a week over Saddam's birthday, came to be called the “Birthday Battle,” and was a happy victory. After two divisions had been thrown at the Iranian positions a tank division was deployed and the Iranians were finally pushed back across the canal, thousands drowning under fire.

Kamel Sachet was promoted in double time. He leapfrogged the staff jobs and held command positions throughout the war. Major to colonel to general. In 1987 he was promoted to the Command of the Baghdad Division of the Republican Guard and his troops stopped an Iranian attack at Shalamche which threatened Basra.

After the battle there was a medal ceremony at the Repub
lican Palace. The ceremony was held in a great state room lined with marble and hung with giant crystal chandeliers and Saddam sat, wearing his habitual wartime green uniform, on a gilt throne at one end. TV cameras bustled at one end of the hall, party officials mingled; here there were always medal ceremonies after a battle, victory or not. By the end of his career Hamdani had fifteen medals. Kamel Sachet, as his son Ali once showed me, had 18 medals of bravery, including the Sash of Rafidain, the Sash for the Mother of All Battles and the decoration “Commander of the Two Rivers.” Medals were accompanied by cars, land and cash; model, quality, and amount dependent on rank and favor. Over the course of his career Kamel Sachet was given cash, many cars and a farm near Hilla, already planted with fruit trees. He loved to spend time among his orchards, but the cars he sold and he used the proceeds for charitable works and for building mosques.

Hamdani did not talk to Kamel Sachet on this medal occasion—they were barely acquaintances, he knew him by reputation only, but he remembers Saddam's extravagant praise of him. “Look at General Sachet!” Saddam pronounced as he shook Kamel's hand in congratulation. “The Iraqi soldier should be in every way like this! Look at him! Look at how fit he is! Look at his courage! Look at his good manners! Kamel Sachet is a commander I treasure.”

 

K
AMEL
S
ACHET'S COURAGE
was hard and straight and upright. He was not a political man and had no taste for the ambitious margins of war. He did not profit from it or turn his position into currency. He was not in the artillery or ever in a staff position: he must have witnessed the poison gas attacks on Iranian positions, seen the summary execution of POWs and
heard the stories of the Anfal campaign against Kurdish villages in the North, but I never heard evidence (despite due diligence and a trip to Kurdistan to talk to former
Peshmerga
commanders there) that he was directly involved in these atrocities.

There was a story, however, which Hamdani told, that seemed to suggest Kamel Sachet had not managed to go through the Iran-Iraq war without absorbing the military shift in morality. When the penalty of death becomes a commonplace, perhaps it becomes unremarkable to order it.

Six years after the battle of Seif Said, after which he found himself on the capital charge of dereliction, in the latter months of 1987, Kamel Sachet was Commander of the Second Division headquartered in Kirkuk. There was a battle at the mountain of Shemiran. Republican Guard reinforcements could not be spared from the fighting in Fao in the South and for two weeks Kamel Sachet ordered his men to attack uphill to dislodge the Iranians. The Iraqi attacks were repulsed, there were no reinforcements to be had, losses were heavy, artillery pummeled over the peaks from inside Iran. The Iraqi line pulled back defensively, but Kamel Sachet ordered them to continue and to break through. According to Hamdani (although I have never managed to verify this), when it was clear the assault had failed, Kamel Sachet and his senior commander Nizar Khazraji ordered the commander of a Special Forces brigade, a Colonel Jafar Sidiq, and several other officers to be executed. Colonel Jafar Sidiq got word of his arrest, fled to Baghdad and managed to get an audience with Saddam Hussein. The colonel explained the difficulties of the battle and their heroic efforts, he said that most of his men had been martyred or wounded and that it was not right to execute the heroes of the Iraqi army. Saddam ordered Kamel Sachet and Khazraji to stop the executions, but his order came too late, seven had already been shot.

Saddam had managed to draw a very neat psycho-circle for his generals, a circle, abused to abuser, like a noose.

 

A
FEW MONTHS
later, March 1988, not far from Shemiran, was the massacre of Halabja. Halabja is a Kurdish town backed up against the mountains. The Iranians and the Kurds coordinated an assault; the Kurds retook Halabja and the Iranians pushed toward the dam at Darbandikhan which, if destroyed, could flood Baghdad. On 15 March
Peshmerga
units captured Halabja; the next day the Iraqi high command, in retribution, frustration and genocidal anger, ordered the town bombed with poisoned gas. Families huddled in their basements from the bombardment, loaded into farm trucks to escape or ran to each other's houses. They collapsed in the street with frothing mouths, their burning lungs drowned, lay sprawled in doorways, cradling dead children, retched in blind lines of refugees up mountain paths. No one knows how many dead, some say five thousand, lay in clumps of limp, tangled bodies with milk crusted eyes.

For many years the gassing of Halabja was confused by the Iranian offensive at the same time: the Iraqi propaganda machine blamed the Iranians for the gas attack, or claimed that there were Iranian troops in the town (there were only a few Iranian intelligence officers). Hamdani called Halabja “a political mistake,” and denied it had happened in the way the Kurds said it had. “This thing about Halabja was a lie. That everyone there was obliterated was a lie. There were some civilians left in the town, but the Iranians had occupied Halabja.” He was upset by the sentence of death that had just been passed on Sultan Hashem, the well liked and well respected (even by a former Kurdish
Peshmerga
commander I talked to in
Sulaimaniya who had been under his command as an intelligence officer in the early eighties) head of the army at the time of Halabja. He blamed it on Kurdish revenge justice and said clearly, “An army is not responsible for political mistakes.”

Hamdani's rebuttal of Halabja reminded me of the slippery prevarications of the Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trials…excesses, mistakes:
yes,…but
. I read Albert Speer's
Inside the Third Reich
. Speer was Hitler's favorite architect, a civilian who rose to become Minister for Armaments in the latter years of the war. Speer was held up for many years as the Nazi who admitted collective responsibility for Nazi atrocities, who put his hands up and refused to excuse his own participation. But he categorically and continually, throughout his trial, his twenty-year imprisonment and until his death in 1981, denied that he knew about the extermination of the Jews or the extent of the slavery of the legions of forced labor that his ministry relied on for war production. In fact, in the whole of his 600-page long, extraordinary, compelling, best-selling rendition of his relationship with and attraction to Hitler I found that only two pages addressed the issue of slave labor in the armaments industry he was responsible for.

After I read Speer I read Gitta Sereny's meticulous biography,
Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth,
in which she tried to probe the shadows behind his erudite dissembling. She wrote, “The truth, of course, is that lies are not necessarily simple,” and came to the conclusion that despite his protestations, Speer must have, in fact, known about the Final Solution. But it was something that Speer's daughter remarked that caught my attention: “How can he admit more,” she asked Sereny, “and go on living?” After all, I thought, what person does not sustain themselves with self-myth? How would it be possible to look in the mirror without it?

Denial is a psychosomatic anesthetic. The truth, the truth about oneself, sheer and plain, is too blinding, too painful to fully realize. Locked inside our own skulls, none of us can claim perspective enough to judge ourselves clearly. But maybe, somehow, the truth does exist, like a kernel, deeper than thought and thinking, beyond the reach of rationalization, society, memory, conditioning, experience…Perhaps this kernel is sometimes called the conscience…