The Weight of a Mustard Seed (9 page)

In the early months of 1944 Speer was hospitalized for several months. His illness, an attack of some kind of neurological exhaustion, was never satisfactorily diagnosed but Sereny, and Speer himself, although characteristically less explicitly, hypothesize that it was some kind of subconscious reaction to the stress of realizing the real horror of what the Third Reich had become.

Sometime in 1987, when he was commander of the Second Division in Kirkuk, after the battle of Shemiran and at the time of the Anfal campaigns, Kamel Sachet came to Dr. Hassan's clinic in Baghdad complaining of chest pains. He was admitted to hospital but the medical investigation found nothing wrong with his heart. Dr. Hassan suggested that his pains might be psychological, a result of anxiety. Kamel Sachet nodded and said simply, “There are too many troubles in the North.” Dr. Hassan knew he had a complicated relationship with Nizar Khazraji, the then Chief of Staff, and that the military situation in the North was critical, but he could see that his friend did not want to talk about it further and so he did not press him.

 

H
AMDANI SHOOK HIS
head at the bullshit trial in Baghdad and all the injustice of the new Iraq (dis)order and I sat back a little. I liked him and his intelligence but Hamdani was a man
who had risen unscathed through the Iran-Iraq war, who had continued his ascent through the corruption and suspicion of the nineties and who had managed to convince the Americans (in much the same way he was convincing me, with his candor and his admiration of Western mores) of his good nature and co-operation, so that although he spent several months being interrogated by army historians and CIA debriefers after the fall of Baghdad, he was never faced with Sultan Hashem's fate.

I asked him how he had managed to steer his career through Saddam's regime. He said that it was his forthrightness, his espousal to the “British way” that was always getting him into trouble, that he had almost been a martyr to his principle. At the end of 1990 he spoke out during a meeting of senior commanders: he said there was no point in discussing the defense of Kuwait when the only thing to be discussed was the withdrawal from Kuwait. For this heresy, he was called an American agent and a traitor, confined to barracks for two weeks and threatened with a military tribunal. His release was secured by Qusay, Saddam's second son. He had been Qusay's commanding officer during the Iran-Iraq war, Qusay liked him and after the retreat from Kuwait he found himself promoted rapidly under his sponsorship and protection. The nineties were the decade of sanctions and corruption and Qusay's star, eclipsing that of his psychotic murderous brother Uday, was in the ascendant. Certainly if Hamdani had managed to hitch his fortunes to that of the favored son, it made sense that he would have done well out of it and stayed safe.

Maybe Hamdani was as good a man as he said he was. I believed Hamdani, mostly. But at the back of my mind, in every interview I ever conducted with Iraqis, was the knowledge that duplicity was as much a part of being Iraqi as excessive pride, excessive hospitality and love of the kebab. In order to thread
their way through the economic detritus, the agents and the sharp-edged apparatus of the Baathie state, Iraqis developed the trick of multiple personalities. They could be belligerent or obsequious, efficient or lazy, in charge or needy, drunk or pious, according to the requirements of the official whose caprice they had to navigate. Flattering and dissembling, Iraqis had learned first to present themselves in whatever shape was convenient to the situation and second to figure out how to get their due benefit from the arrangement. Their dealings with the Americans was no different. One story for the American sergeant of the foot patrol that handed out sweets to the neighborhood kids, another for the Shia official with a bristly beard and no tie who might employ you to build part of a new ministry, another for your red-check-scarfed neighbor who wanted to blow it up. I began to understand that lying was how Iraqis had survived—those that managed to—through the vicissitudes of revolution, war and occupation, mosque and army unit, classroom and government report, promotion and arrest.

Hamdani was talking to me, a Westerner, and he knew that he must praise Western traits. Perhaps he really believed in them, perhaps not. But several times he highlighted his belief in straightforwardness and lamented that it was so disparaged in Arab cultures.

“It often got me into trouble with Saddam Hussein, this frankness!…The truth is, in our culture, frankness is disrespect.” In 1995 Hamdani had presented a paper, “Criticism on the Strategy of the Second Gulf War,” at a military forum chaired by Saddam and including 180 senior officers. As he spoke, his words echoed louder into the stunned silence that received them. The moderator tried to move the microphone away from him. “There was a silence in the room like the silence that precedes the hurricane. Saddam of course was very
angry.” Saddam had stood up and brought his fist down on the table.

“Look at General Hamdani! This man is a casualty of Western ideology caused by continual reading and listening to Western media! If he was correct about his thesis, there would be no one in this room left alive today! I do not allow—” and at this he pointed his finger directly and emphatically at Hamdani.

Hamdani looked at the faces around him and saw they were all looking down into their laps, as if they didn't want to look at a dead man.

“This decision to discuss only the bright points of anything consumed the truth,” and the truth was layered with the lies that the authority demanded. This was Hamdani's second reproach. A year earlier Saddam had mooted a reinvasion of Kuwait; Hamdani had challenged this and Saddam had been furious.

Saddam. Saddam was the concentration of everything.

“Sometimes you would feel so close to him that you could spill your heart to him and other times you felt you were in a cage with a hungry lion.” Hamdani had thought long and hard about Saddam, his character, the contradictions and hubris, intelligence and stupidity. For Hamdani, even the mad monster deserved some
yes,…but.
“Saddam had strong charisma. Face to face you felt that he looked right through you to your mind and your feelings, that he knew everything about you. He was a good reader and often a good listener and other times the exact opposite and would brook no other opinion. And other times he would ramble on some trivial subject: the worst thing was his speeches! They were long with no point, they were the opposite of a tidy and analytical mind. For example, everyone knew that he would receive letters, from Bush Senior, from John Major and Arab leaders and these letters would be
five sentences long and he would reply with ten pages! He had aspects of greatness and he built the country. But then he destroyed it. He destroyed his own ambition, when he crossed a red line that he himself had drawn. In February 1980 he gave a famous speech and said that an Arab should not fight another Arab and then he became the leader of the first [
sic
] Arab nation to invade another Arab nation. He talked of democracy but he was a dictator. Once he heard that one of his ministers had slapped a common civilian and he called the minister and the civilian who he had slapped and ordered the civilian to slap the minister back. But then he executed many, many…

“Saddam had more than one personality. If you had Sigmund Freud and Adler and others and set them to analyze this personality I don't think they would come to any one single theory. He was a thinker, he had a great humanitarian aspect, he was very generous and softhearted. But there was a murderous personality, very hard—the kind of hardness that would not even be taken by a beast. And he was a simple farmer, uncivilized and shackled by village ways. The difficulties of his early life and his ambitions—that went way beyond anything. At fourteen he used to dream of leading the Arab world, to be a second Saladin, that history would remember him always. He made history, yes, but there will always be a debate—”

Hamdani had tried to keep his own sense of self intact and to balance his opinions with his duty. He tried to command as fairly as he could, and to question when he could. When he could no longer question, “I tried to continue indirectly so that I wouldn't lose the thing I had built in myself, because to lose this would mean the loss of my life.”

Hamdani shook his head, perhaps at his own failures, perhaps at the echo of these failures, perhaps at his country's descent, which seemed to last longer and plumb deeper than a
patriot could bear. We returned to a discussion of the Iran-Iraq war, to the ironies of proud medal ceremonies and the battles that scraped Iraq raw. “Although the war was victorious in terms of the military,” said Hamdani, equivocating, as was his wont, and then delivering the final and devastating assessment: “it destroyed the Iraqi economy and Iraq. The psychological problems that rose through the Iraqi social life and the criminal age we have today came out of that war.”

 

I
N
2003 H
AMDANI
was commander of the 2
^nd
Corps of the Republican Guard in charge of the southern theater and the defense of Baghdad, the city the Americans promised to shock and awe. “Of course,” said Hamdani, “I knew from the beginning we would lose.” When the phone rang in his house he would pick it up and find a recorded message talking to him: “There is no way to oppose the United States!” “Stay in your home where you will be safe!” He hung up. The Mukhabarat, the intelligence service, were certainly listening, and in any case it was an obvious piece of psyops.

He planned to fight for as long as possible. He thought the Iraqi army might be able to hold out for two or three months at best.

The American F16s bombed his division to smithereens. After only a few days his troops were smashed and he found himself without a single vehicle—not a jeep, not even a commandeered taxi; everything had been destroyed—in a band of thirty-odd survivors. He split the men into groups and told them to disperse, traveling by foot on the dirt back-roads through the farmlands south of Baghdad. He made his way to the house of a cousin in Youssifiya. He liked this cousin, who
had given up his government post as an engineer and taken a second wife and gone to live in the countryside. It was an odd sort of life for an educated man, but Hamdani respected his desire for independence. The cousin welcomed him and gave him the use of a shepherd's hut on the edge of his land; it was safer than in the main house where he might be seen.

Hamdani felt himself grateful, empty and exhausted. His face and arms were scratched from the blasting bombs, he had a pebble of shrapnel in one calf, his limbs ached from walking. He took off his uniform and folded it carefully and hid it with his Kalashnikov in a duffel bag and put on a borrowed pair of trousers and a flannel shirt. One of the wives brought him food, one of the small sons brought him a pen and writing paper and he began to rewrite the diary that had been burned when his jeep had been hit. The small sons watched him write and shook their heads: “Is he studying for his exams or something?”

Baghdad fell on 9 April and the Americans toppled Saddam's statue. Hamdani was sitting in his cousin's guest room with a few of his cousin's friends when he heard the news. There was no electricity and the kerosene lamps made small pools of yellow light. Hamdani described his mood as almost “dying from grief.” He could not eat. He thought about his cousin's life, how he had teased him about his big family and the two wives—unusual for an educated man, and living so far out on a farm in some kind of oblivion; his cousin had laughed at his jibes and said he was happier: “I can start my own tribe!” Hamdani had chided him for favoring one of his sons above the other: “Be careful or they will end up like the story of Jacob!” Now he remembered his own sons, both of whom had been deployed with the Republican Guard and who were now, like most of the army, and himself, missing.

One of his cousin's relatives was very happy Saddam was finished. “Thank God we got rid of Saddam and the Americans are here! Soon they will rebuild everything.”

Hamdani told him he thought this was a very naïve view. “We won't have the power and authority that has ruled this country and there will be a vacuum and this will be very dangerous.”

“So if you know all this and you are so clever why didn't you organize a coup against Saddam? You are a high commander!”

“This is another naïve view,” Hamdani replied quietly. “You don't understand the complexities. If there is no power to equal the power that has just been removed then there is no one to take control and this could end in civil war.”

The happy optimistic man said, “Well, I am betting on the Americans, we'll meet again in the future and you will see that I was right!”

The following day Hamdani hid near a brush fence and watched two American armored Bradlee vehicles position themselves at the village crossroads. He had fought the Americans in two wars, but this was the first time he had been able to observe their soldiers up close. He saw how young they were and this surprised him for some reason. He also noticed the standard of their professionalism, their discipline, the way they always held their guns in the ready position with their index finger horizontal, flat above the trigger guard. He saw that not one of them took off their armor or their helmets, despite the heat. During the day he crept around in irrigation ditches to see more. At another intersection he found tanks. He saw that on each tank the razor wire was looped neatly and hung on a hook, that the jerrycans were stored in their own brackets, and that everything was kept neatly in its proper place. Two months earlier he had stopped two officers of the Republican
Guard driving toward him on the barracks road, both had been bare-headed and he had berated them for leaving their berets off. “We have talked about this before and I gave you a photograph of an American soldier and an Iraqi soldier, the American was clean and tidy and the Iraqi was disheveled and holding his gun awry and I know you were both there when I showed these pictures and I asked you all then, which looks the more impressive soldier and most of you replied, the American.”