The Weight of a Mustard Seed (19 page)

 

T
HE END, WHEN
it came, was a foreign invasion. The Americans! Operation Iraqi Freedom! Weapons of Mass Destruction! War on Terror! Mission Accomplished! Tank columns streaming through the desert, shock and awe exploding palaces. For the Iraqis there was a chink of hope amid all the destruction and the conundrum of how to be free under occupation.

On 10 April 2003, the day after Americans pulled Saddam's statue down in Firdous Square in Baghdad, Adnan convened a tribal meeting in Latifiya, a town south of Baghdad heavily populated by Janabis. He asked his elders, the tribal judges and leaders of smaller affiliated tribes, what they wished to do. Many said that the dignity of Iraq was being trampled and they should fight. Adnan listened and replied: “If we all agree to fight then I will fight with you and we will fight together. But first think of the consequences. This is the Americans, they have their annihilating bombs. If we fight, they will certainly retaliate against any resistance. I do not think the Americans come to take our land; they have no imperial will or ambition. I believe they want to install a government over which they have some influence—and where in the world is there a
government over which America has no influence? Perhaps it is better to wait and co-operate and we will be better able to protect our families and our communities in this way.”

At the beginning the tribal elders agreed and resistance was petty. Once a week the American commander in Hilla came to see Adnan in his
mudhif
for consultation. Adnan was able to discover which Janabis they were targeting for arrest and in some circumstances get some detained Janabis released. But after six months the arrests and night-time hard-knock raids grew more frequent and indiscriminate, false witness and vested interest; even tribal dignitaries were being arrested and sucked into Abu Ghraib without process or paper trail, denied lawyers, interrogated, ignored, lost in the system for weeks while their families petitioned locked gates. The American commander in Hilla rotated and Adnan found he had no influence with his successor. In Baghdad he could not gain access to the local commanders at all.

People grew angry, unsettled. A Janabi imam denounced Adnan at Friday prayer: “Our sheikh: a collaborator!” The imam was banished by tribal council, barred from preaching by other imams, and Adnan sought out a meeting with him to confront his views. The preacher said to him, “I concede you are trying to help. But all these tribal leaders are useless. We have a new situation here. They are only looking after their own goats.”

One night, a few months into the occupation, Adnan and his wife and his two grown sons were at home in Baghdad watching television. They heard a loud banging blast and rattling and then shouting. His home was being raided. Several American soldiers, oversized, bulked up with armored vests and combat webbing, helmets like storm troopers, night sights like metal mandibles, burst in. Adnan stood up to remonstrate but he was
pushed by a shoving, gloved hand at the back of his neck, face down into the carpet.

We were sitting in Beirut, talking in a quiet bar, Adnan was drinking whiskey. When he told me this story he did not look at me, he looked down into his glass, at bitter brackish memory.

“They don't understand anything about our culture, nothing.”

I said something sympathetic. I understood, I told him, about curdled pride—for the head of the family to be dishonored this way in front of his wife and sons—not the fear (no Iraqi ever admitted to fear), but the humiliation of it.

Adnan cut me off. “No. It is not the same.” He was not any ordinary man suffering the indignity of occupation. He was a sheikh, a leader. “It was unacceptable,” he insisted, “completely unacceptable.”

Adnan never told anyone what had happened. He bent his pride and went on trying to work with the Americans within the framework of the ongoing political process, the efforts to write a constitution and prepare for a sovereign Iraqi government. He joined the government as a minister without portfolio, and allied himself to Ayad Allawi, who the Americans were positioning as a secular unifying Iraqi leader. At the end of March 2004, after four American contractors were attacked driving through Fallujah and the Americans surrounded the town with tanks, Adnan tried to negotiate between the Americans and a local insurgent leader who was a Janabi. The insurgent leader agreed to evict the foreign fighters in return for a ceasefire, but local
jihadi
firebrands called him a traitor and denounced any compromise.

“The moderates always lose after a while,” Adnan lamented. He tried to talk to the “hotheads,” but admonishment and
reason were deflected with ideology. The tide had already turned, violence crashed into press conferences, and the insurgency made any political process moot, although no one yet admitted this. The Shia exile parties, the Dawa and SCIRI (Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq), the latter an Iranian protégé, held the ascendancy, local Shia factions (mostly the Mehdi army) armed themselves by joining the police force, then feuded and blew into revolt; and the Sunnis became embittered and enflamed and complained rancorously, to no apparent effect, that the Americans were taking sides.

 

I
N
J
ANUARY
2005, just before the first elections, I went to see Adnan in Baghdad at a house he rented in a guarded ministerial compound adjacent to the GreenZone. He said he would send an escort car with two of his bodyguards, and we arranged to meet them in a flat space of cracked asphalt underneath the Jadriyeh bridge. In the past it had been a place where husbands came to teach their wives how to drive, now it was an open-air speakeasy in defiance of Shia vigilantes who firebombed the alcohol shops. It was twilight, a guard-gunman waved us in. Men sat on the concrete parapet along the river with cans of beer in their hand or a small flask of arak in front of them, watching the purple dust dusk settle, sunset over the Tigris smudged with the black smoke from the Dora power station.

Adnan's bodyguards found us, signaled to follow them and we drove around the edge of the GreenZone, twelve foot high concrete blast walls on one side. At some point there was an opening and we turned right into a concrete canyon and stopped at a checkpoint. The bodyguards in the car ahead of us showed their passes and we were waved through, around
another bend, slowed into a tank jack chicane, and waited behind another car being checked at the second checkpoint by Iraqi army soldiers. The two men in the car ahead held their arms out to be padded down. Above us was a watchtower on stilts fortified with sandbags. We got out of the car to show our identification and present our bags to be searched. I looked up, the concrete blast walls made a trench of narrowed sky edged with filigree razor wire. The soldiers finished searching the two men in the car ahead of us and handed them back their guns, a Kalashnikov to one, a pistol to the other, who stuffed it back in the waistband of his trousers.

The searched us perfunctorily. One of the soldiers excitedly pointed at his chest, making a joke.

“Saddam Hussein. Me Saddam Hussein!”

“Bah! Your mustache is not big enough!”

And he pointed to his ID, which showed that his name was indeed Saddam Hussein.

We found Adnan in a fury. He had just resigned from the cabinet.

“Oh the D.o.D. has its own ideas, they trample over everyone's heads. Practically everything that could go wrong happened. They actually made every single error they could have. What they say is correct. We
are
stooges of the Americans.”

He had resigned in protest at all of the mess and manipulation and because the day before he had been arrested by a sneering and officious American sergeant at an entrance to the GreenZone where he was going for a meeting with the Deputy Prime Minister. The sergeant had looked at his pass and said it was no longer valid. Adnan asked to see his commanding officer, the sergeant became even ruder, Adnan asked his name and unit. The sergeant looked at his men, irritated and nonchalant, “I think he's gotta be arrested.” So they pinned his arms
behind his back and tied his hands with plastic flexi cuffs and showed no interest in his protestations.

Now he cursed his participation. Several of his relatives had been kidnapped and killed. He was used to driving himself, without bodyguards and unarmed. Now he traveled in a five car convoy with thirty gunmen, “And,” he added, in sheer frustration rather than fear, “I am never safe!”

 

F
OR A LONG
time the civil war was called sectarian violence. It was piebald, bandit, vicious, hard to fathom and impossible to contain. Baghdad neighborhoods became cantons, separated by vigilante gunmen groups, berms, roadblocks, checkpoints, ID killings. Families (many of whom were mixed; it was common for Sunni to marry Shia) were labeled and then forced out of their homes at gunpoint. South of Baghdad Sunni and Shia were historically mingled around Latifiya and Mahmoudiya, Shia were hauled out of their cars on the roads and shot, reprisals, revenge, intimidation flared through the villages. Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia mixed with local insurgent groups, the reconstituted Iraqi army, such as it was, seemed full of Shia thugs or Kurdish mercenaries. The area became known as the Triangle of Death.

Adnan was exhausted by the violence. “The Americans are murdering Janabis and the Janabis, whether they are Sunni or Shia, are murdering each other!” He swallowed a gulp of whiskey.

“And the Janabis are the worst!”

 

B
EIRUT
, I
SRAELI BOMBS
and its own civil disorder notwithstanding, was respite. By the summer of 2007, when I saw
him, Adnan had relaxed into his exile. I met him in Paul for coffee and we sat surrounded by the Lebanese grandee class with its peacock women: high lacquered hair, arched eyebrows, lip liner and bronzed cleavage, Cartier watches looped around their wrists and Prada bags dangling from their fingers. Adnan and I laughed a little at the display; I noticed he himself had adopted resort wear: he was tanned and wore a crisp beige linen safari suit with no tie.

“I would rather be
chic
than sheikh,” he joked, showing off his new sunglasses. “You see I am relaxed these days, I am doing practically nothing!” He handed me a business card with the name of the new think tank channeling technocratic expertise into policy and legislation suggestions for the Iraqi government. He shrugged, he said it kept his mind ticking over, his efforts engaged.

The civil war had entered the warlord phase. The news was consistently atrocious. Adnan admitted he could no longer bring himself to watch it; I said I could not either. There was no point even talking about it any more. Instead I asked him about his son Salam. He looked at his watch, not for the first time, I realized.

“He's at the airport. He should be getting on a plane to Amman soon—but, you know, always delays. Sometimes you have to spend all night at the airport if there's a security alert.”

“But he's at the airport,” I confirmed to encourage him, “so he got through the road alright.”

“Yes, yes,” Adnan nodded, “but this morning I was very nervous about it.”

Salam had been in Baghdad for the previous four months, waiting to get a new G-series passport that would allow him to travel. The new G-series passports were gold dust in Iraq then, it was a year of exodus, hundreds of thousands of people had
left their homes, many fled across the easiest border, to Syria. Salam had sensibly bribed someone in the passport office, but that person had been arrested and so they had to worry about Salam's name showing up on some blacklist and then they had to find other people to bribe. Finally, he had got the passport just three days before. Adnan said he didn't think Salam had left the house more than three times in the whole past four months.

“It's an Iraqi mess,” I ventured. “Now it seems like an Iraqi mess even more than an American mess.”

Adnan nodded. I widened the discussion. I said I had been reading to try to understand—the breakdown of society, moral collapse, barbarism, totalitarianism—not the books written now, in the contemporaneous maelstrom, but books from another time and place, from Stalin's Russia and the aftermath of the Nazis: the old school history trick of compare and contrast. I mentioned Solzhenitsyn.

“You know I could never finish
Gulag Archipelago
,” he said.

I told him I couldn't either. “I mean I read it. But I could not read it as a whole beginning to end. It was too long, too terrible.” We discussed parallels and insight, but the mirror was too sharp to be able to look at directly.

I said to him, “You know, what I always remember from the
Gulag Archipelago
is the beginning, when he describes how most people, officials, mid level men who knew what the system was because they were part of it, who sat in those new apparatchik apartment blocks in Moscow and watched their neighbors disappear and the apartments around them empty, sat at home and simply waited to be arrested, they did not flee or hide or disappear into some small town somewhere. Even when the knock came, they did not try to run or jump out of the window or get away…”

“Yes,” said Adnan, “in '74 you know what I did when I had that call from Saddam? After I wrote the report about his oil selling deals during the embargo. I had a call from Saddam and he threatened me directly. Afterwards I left the office immediately. I collected my wife from her university campus, we collected Salam, he was small then, from kindergarten, and I drove around for several hours. My wife told me: whatever you decide I am with you. I had the possibility to go to the countryside or to Kurdistan because I had friends in the resistance there, and there was a mutiny in that year and you could get to an area which the government did not control—but I went home.” He paused, evaluating. “It was a subconscious submission. I cannot rationalize it, even now. I went home and I stayed at home for two weeks.”