Customer Reviews

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

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It's hard not to feel positively toward a writer who risks traveling to dangerous places in the pursuit of journalism. An Anglo-American woman who lived for months at a time in post-Ba'athist Iraq, during the most dangerous phase of the terrorist uprising, deserves double kudos. Though not fluent in Arabic - she refers several times to depending on translators - Wendell Steavenson has gleaned from interviews with many Iraqis this impressionistic and episodic account of the career of General Kamel Sachet Aziz al-Janabi, who rose high in the ranks of Saddam Hussein's military before being executed for unknowable reasons in December 1998.

As a picture of the turbulence and precariousness of life in the upper ranks of the Saddamite regime, The Weight of a Mustard Seed is admirable. Unfortunately, Miss Steavenson's informants, primarily General Sachet's family and close friends, provide more specifics about his private than his public life, and overlay their data with apologias. His roles in the Iran-Iraq War and the invasion of Kuwait remain cloudily heroic. His tenure as a provincial governor is praised for relieving oppression and attending to the needs of the poor. Yet the incompetence of the Iraqi Army, as well as its resort to chemical weapons, is notorious, and Sachet governed a province whose wetlands were being drained to destroy the lifeways of the rebellious Marsh Arabs. Was the hero a shining light of competence and rectitude against this dark background? Maybe, but the author does little to question or probe the encomia of her sources.

Also left unclear is the extent to which her narrative is founded on solid fact rather than her own speculative imagination. She presents not just verbatim conversations but the inner thoughts and psychological states of Sachet and others. How far has she extrapolated? How much have the portraits of Moslems brought up under a capricious tyranny been reshaped by the mentality of footloose, liberated Western journalist whose acquaintance with Islam appears not to be the deepest? (She thinks, for instance, that "Hadith" is the title of a book.)

There is, to tell the truth, a certain 30-going-on-13 quality to the writing: breathless, comma-free sentences, adolescent platitudes about the banality of evil, portentous references to Solzhenitsyn and Hannah Arendt and Primo Levi, a limited historical horizon. The author keeps asking, "How could such things have happened?" It never occurs to her than reading the history of the Middle East might reveal more than pop-science articles about contrived psychological experiments.

The climax of the book is General Sachet's mysterious death. Contemporary rumor claimed that Saddam's son Qusay shot him personally. Miss Steavenson refutes that tale by finding a witness to the execution, carried out at Abu Ghraib by a Presidential Guard firing squad. The government never proffered any explanation beyond an accusation of unspecified "treason". None of the author's interviewees can add anything but guesswork. It's conceivable that Sachet, who had turned increasingly to Wahhabi-style piety, was involved in Saudi plots to replace Saddam with a more stable figure. Or he may have been the victim of mere tyrannical impulse. That Saddam later paid compensation to the general's family and left them free, in relatively prosperous circumstances, hints at the latter.

Half a decade later, General Sachet's sons joined the terrorist campaign against democracy in Iraq. At least one has been killed in action. Are they rebelling against their father or following in his footsteps? Frustratingly, this book doesn't help us decide. Nonetheless, despite its adolescent superficiality, it serves as a good reminder of how monstrous Saddam's rule was and why, whether or not Miss Steavenson believes it, Iraq is a happier land without him.

"The weight of a mustard seed", written by Wendell Steavenson, is a book that is well worth the read for individuals who wish to gather a sense of what it was like living in Iraq under the rule of Saddam Hussein. In this expansive story which covers multiple decades of the life of who was to become General Kamel Sachet, the author describes various events throughout his life as explained by third person observers. The was, in my opinion, a very good, sound addition to the literature. In a quite subjective manner, Steavenson writes, often in a flower-esque manner various events of his life. Other reviewers criticize that this book apologizes for Sachet's role in atrocities committed by the Hussein regime. It does. That's part of the fascination with this book. It helps us, neutral third parties, to see a different perspective than our own. That's cool and it is achieved quite effectively. It is also noted by another reviewer that the only references to the United States were negative. While I hold tremendous honor and respect for the brave men and women of the United States military who have risked or, in many cases, given their lives, I also believe that the point of this book is to transport the reader to a different perspective, a different culture, a different belief system. It really does help to know the world around us and its peoples. It might be understandable, in my mind, to hear statements that are negative about the United States, following two major military actions and hundreds of minor military actions over the last 18 years and after hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers died in almost unilateral military conflict with the United States. I felt that there was some sense of diminished responsibility on his behalf that was argued in the book because of the terroristic crazy regime in which Sachet found himself. While sort of understandable, it is hard for me to ultimately mitigate, in my mind, his role in some of the atrocities committed by the Hussein regime. It's an excellent read for those who are willing to allow their minds to be tugged beyond what they've been told to believe. I give this book an A-. I think that the writer has tremendous potential and I look forward to reading future works by her.

I really expected to be fascinated with this book ... not necessarily to enjoy reading it, but to discover interesting and useful information that could help make sense out of the senseless. Unfortunately, that's not what's here.

In fact, after only a hundred pages, I just didn't have the stomach for more. I set the book aside, determined to come back and finish it only because it was an Amazon Vine pre-read and I felt obligated to trudge through the remaining pages and post a review. Even when I at last made it to the end, I didn't feel enlightened, didn't feel I understood any more, just felt like I'd wasted precious time in an icky place that wasn't even well enough documented to feel certain its darkness was accurately portrayed.

No one expects a book subtitled, "An Iraqi General's Moral Journey During the Time of Saddam" to be a pretty little story. Even so, I expected more introspection and less graphic violence. Detailed portrayals of battles seen on television don't succeed in conveying the promised "moral journey". And, while I realize that getting interviews with the Iraqi general in question was problematic, I rather hoped to have met him in person (in print, of course!) by the time I'd read a third of the way into the book. I hadn't.

Further, I acknowledge that finding and sharing evidence to support the source stories would be incredibly challenging, and that there's a need to protect many sources currently living in Iraq. At the same time, I'm a bit disappointed by the extent to which the story so far is pure undocumented hearsay, usually second- or even third-hand.

There's more I could say, but I've really spent quite enough time with this author already, and just want to be done with it. So, no more writing at the moment!

I have to admit...getting into this book was very slow for me. I was intrigued by the story and looked forward to getting the book. Unfortunately, for me, the front end of the book was rather slow and included pages upon pages of information that failed to pique my interest. After opening and closing the book for weeks at a time, I finally reached a point where the meat was served and I wanted more.

While there is a lot to learn from the book (i.e., from a historical perspective, particularly by those who know little about the middle east), the most grasping point of the book was garnering an understanding of what life must have been like under Saddam's repressive regime. The tragedies that one of Iraq's beloved heroes endured under his regime are quite telling; If Saddam can treat a national hero with such little regard, one can only imagine how the common man was treated. For anyone who ever questioned what kind of leader Saddam was, this is a fabulous eye-opener; a true story of one of his own men. I would recommend the book, suggesting one muddle through the (what I perceived to be slow) front-end; it really is a worthwhile read.

Kamel Sachet was a famous Iraqi soldier. As a special forces officer during the Iran-Iraq War, he distinguished himself through bravery and was well-regarded by his troops. He was promoted to general and commanded the army during Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Following Iraq's defeat, he was appointed governor of the Maysan Province, in which role he helped put down the intifada against Saddam Hussein's rule.

Knowing these facts might dispose you to judge Kamel harshly for his complicity in Saddam's reign of terror. Wendell Steavenson certainly doesn't excuse his sins. But she paints a morally complex portrait of a patriot who came to loathe Saddam and find solace for his sins in an increasingly strict observance of Islam.

The Weight of a Mustard Seed tells Kamel's story through interviews with family members, friends, colleagues, and subordinates. The backdrop of these interviews is the March 2003 American invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, during which the long-suffering Iraqis suffered some more. Many of Steavenson's interviewees, like Kamel, were soldiers and members of the Baath Party. Their stories are as morally complex as his. On the one hand, they committed atrocities. On the other hand, they were victims of atrocities. Most of them, like Kamel, were arrested and tortured during their tenure of service in the army. Kamel himself was executed by the regime in December 1998.

From the comfort of America, with our long traditions of open government and the rule of law, it is easy to critique the Iraqis for their complicity. But what would you do if the regime arrested you, tortured you, targeted your family, and otherwise used the carrot of security and the stick of insecurity to get your compliance? Steavenson asks these questions. She does not offer answers, but her narrative is engrossing.

My main criticism of the book is that, while its narrative moves forward in roughly chronological sequence, it tells the story of Kamel Sachet through the eyes of others, intertwining his story with theirs. At times, this gets confusing. Overall, however, the book is well worth reading, if only to humanize our enemies and to remind us that, as Solzhenitsyn put it, the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of everyone.

This is an insider's account of Iraq under the Hussein regime written by the most outside of outsiders---a Western woman.

Wendell Steavenson digs into the story of General Kamel Sachet to uncover the mystery of why so many Iraqis became willing tools of one of the most brutal psycopaths on the planet.

In so doing, she uncovers missing pieces to the puzzle of Iraqi conduct throughout the past 30 years and to the root of the insurgency of the past few years.

While a bit naive from the get-go (Steavenson seems a bit befuddled as to why her interview subjects don't open up more about the atrocities they've witnessed, apparently not quite understanding the blackmail ring Hussein & company used to brutal effectiveness against the more reluctant members of the regime), she does get considerably more information into the record than the Green Zone Guerrilas who represent her colleagues ever did.

Where else will you learn that Iraqi soldiers made up for a lack of handcuffs by nailing Kuwaiti prisoners ears to planks? Or that Abu Ghraib was far more of a house of horrors BEFORE it entered the American media lexicon than afterward? Or that Uday Hussein killed a man at a dinner party right in front of Egypt president Hosni Mubarak's wife?

These are things which the American media have been very reluctant to report---otherwise, the American invasion might well be seen as the liberation it was.

Steavenson also demonstrates how the insurgency came about, at least at the local level. The key factor was the disastrous decision to take de-Baathification to the extreme level. In a tribal culture, this essentially emasculated the sheikhs, who simply transferred their allegiance to whomever would preserve their influence.

Unfortunately, Steavenson's subject remains an enigma. How could Sachet commit horrible atrocities on one day and acts of kindness at great personal risk the next? How did he navigate the vicissitudes of Saddam's paranoia sufficiently well to advance over decades only to earn execution in the waning days of the regime?

Still and all, this is a great read and an informative one for anyone who views Iraq through something more than the narrow lens of Bush-hatred.

Wendell Steavenson admits right up front that Saddam Hussein would have been unable to sustain his brutal dictatorship of Iraq without the help of those willing to carry out the horrible atrocities he directed. Be it war against neighboring countries, massacre of fellow Iraqis or torture prisons filled with those seen by Saddam to be a threat to his regime, he could not have managed it alone. Steavenson is not a naïve woman; she fully understands that her many interviews with former Iraqi Army officers have to be filtered through the eyes of a skeptic because those with whom she spoke were more interested in spinning a story that would justify what they personally did during the Saddam years than they were in telling the truth.

Despite her skepticism, Steavenson decided that the men deserved to be heard and the result is "The Weight of a Mustard Seed: An Iraqi General's Moral Journey during the Time of Saddam." Not surprisingly, along with claiming to have never felt fear in battle, each of those interviewed claims to have always tried to limit the brutality of Saddam's orders as best he could despite the danger to the lives of himself and his family for having done so. Iraqi military men, much as the Germans did after Hitler, have orally rewritten their history to the point that Saddam was the only bad person there and everyone else was, to varying degrees, one of his victims. Of course, that is a lie - and Steavenson does not pretend otherwise.

"The Weight of a Mustard Seed" focuses on General Kamel Sachet, a man eventually executed upon the orders of Saddam despite the fact that he was a Saddam favorite for most of his military career. Steavenson came to believe from all the interviews she conducted with Sachet's fellow officers that he might have indeed had cleaner (though not clean) hands than most. However, she reminds the reader that she reached this conclusion by speaking with Iraqis, all the time fully aware that the art of duplicity is part of being an Iraqi, and that survival under the Saddam reign of terror required Iraqis to develop multiple personalities from which they could choose to fit the occasion.

What emerges from "The Weight of a Mustard Seed" is an inside look at the men who made it possible for Saddam to brutalize Iraq for so many years. Despite their attempts to hide the truth, and to make themselves look better than they were, the interviews reveal interesting detail about the military, the prisons, the purges and the tribal rivalries that made it all so easy for Saddam to surround himself with men as brutal as him. It is necessary to read between the lines and to compare the stories of different speakers, but one does come away with a sense of how Saddam was able to make Iraq into his personal playground for so many years.

Wendell Steavenson's attempted portrait of an Iraqi general has a catchy but inappropriate title. It refers to a promise (or threat) in the Koran that each man will be judged after his death and his deeds will be balanced down to the weight of a mustard seed.

While this is a typically primitive Muslim idea -- a Mao might balance out his mistakes with his undoubted accomplishments and get into paradise despite having done 80 million people to death -- such precision would hardly be needed to handle Lt. Gen. Kamel Sachet, whose transgressions would balance a scale loaded with many sacks worth of good deeds.

His career can be briefly told: A natural thug rises from poverty by hitching his star to a gangster regime, which ends it by shooting him. Steavenson attempts to add some contour to this tedious and oft-repeated tale by proposing that Sachet was slowly revulsed by the regime but could not find a way to escape his original mistake. She interviewed Sachet`s family, friends and colleagues (though not any of his victims), looking deep into their eyes, as if answers were to be found there. "It was this disquiet that I was searching for, these flickers of conscience," she says.

Instead, she always got what she calls the "Yes (I did bad things), but (I am not responsible for them) . . ." reply.

Sachet was not there to explain himself, but her evidence that he found a conscience is thin: After the brutality of the invasion of Kuwait, Sachet tried to withdraw from the army and he got religion. However, nothing she presents is incompatible with the hypothesis that Sachet's disgust with the Baathists and Saddamists was purely instrumental: They were losers.

In western terms, a turn to religion is conventionally interpreted -- by the turners, anyway -- as a discovery of guilt and conscience and remorse. In practice, even in the West, it is often nothing more than a cynical stratagem to get a judge to award probation for behavior that deserves prison. In Islam, it doesn't even have to be that. Islam demands only the fulfillment of empty rituals. It can in some minds become more, but in Sachet's mind it does not seem to have done so. His idea of rejecting secular Baathism and Saddamism for religion seems -- on the evidence presented here -- to have been limited to building cheap mosques, being punctilious about groveling in prayer at precise times and making his wife wear a tent.

That this was solace to him does not also mean it was an expression of conscience. Steavenson quotes one of Sachet's closest army friends in a line that calls into question the idea of the book: "He did not betray any guilt. Guilt would have been an alien emotion to him."

It is not obvious that Steavenson is qualified to investigate anybody else's moral sense anyway. She is a moral relativist who does not believe in the concept of evil; to her, it is a "Hollywood word."

The book is full of steps taken backward from the immediate scene, in order to let Steavenson show us her universal wisdom. None of these survives a second reading and some are downright silly, like the claim that "all occupying armies end up behaving the same way." She and Sachet were both in Kuwait, she should have asked a Kuwaiti about that.

All this does not mean that "The Weight of a Mustard Seed" is completely without value. Although Kamel Sachet left no papers and was not available to be interviewed, members of his family and people who knew him more or less well were happy to gossip about him. Dr. Hassan, the psychiatrist and army friend of Sachet's who tells us that of course the general did not experience guilt, tells us something useful. As do Sachet's jihadi murderer sons.

If Steavenson had paid attention to her informants, it could have been a different book: How Kamel Sachet, disillusioned with secularism, turned to religion and attempted to steer his children away from senseless secular killing, only to have them kill (and be killed) in the name of senseless religious myths.

Irony, however, is not in Steavenson's nature.

She would like us to come away with the thought that all peoples have similar desires and moral outlooks. What she actually does, though, is to provide some dozens of from-the-horse's-mouth anecdotes and confessions tending to confirm Professor Samuel Huntington's opposite conclusion in "The Clash of Cultures."

Impressive writing by someone who was able to sneak around, bravely I might add, throughout the violent streets, alleys and neighborhoods of occupied Iraq. For some, as I see in other reviews, the back and forth caused a little difficulty. But for me, after patiently reading through the first couple of chapters caught the tenor of the book.

We really take off when she is interviewing and visiting the family of the General Kamel Sachet, we wonder, where is he all along the discussion. We hear of his exploits from his family and even a faint reminder of one positive battle that made him a hero in Iraq's drawn out war with Iran.

As we weave through the many personalities to find and get an almost 360 degree review of him (well, a true 360 would include Saddam.) It was fascinated by the depth of information we get about, not only Colonel Sachet, but of the wars and slow destruction of Iraqi society. How one man, and his family, could control so many disparate and desperate peoples and to see a country that had pride go into such utter chaos. Really, if history is to be read to avoid such things from happening, there are so very many lessons here.

The Weight of a Mustard Seed is written with such passion for the peoples involved and as Steavenson shows us, the story is not yet complete.

General Kamel Sachet was a highly esteemed general officer in the Saddam-era Iraqi military apparatus. He was even one of the dictator's favorites. Sachet's life, as chronicled by Wendell Steavenson in her book "The Weight of a Mustard Seed," serves as a telling example of life in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

It is also an example life in Iraq over the last five decades and a view of the Iraqi Arab experience under Ba'ath Party rule. The author's interview with the former Iraqi tanker General Hamdani was most revealing with the constant refrain of "Yes, but..." Yes we did bad things, but...we had to. Kamel Sachet was a good soldier yet it did not keep him out of trouble with Saddam Hussein's regime, who wanted everyone unquestioningly subservient to Saddam and his thugs.

When recalled from retirement to duty as governor of Maysan province, Sachet executed his orders unquestioningly--including summary executions and the draining of the Salt Marshes of southern Iraq--but was also remembered as a humane governor who lavished attention on the poor and downtrodden. In the end Sachet's piety, grown out of his Iran-Iraq War experience, became extremely suspect to the Ba'ath Party's security services. Rumored unreported propaganda from exiles served to be the cause of his second and final downfall. Along with his sense of duty-bound honor, his fate was sealed.

The writing style was a peculiar one, like a stream of consciousness but not quite. There are factual errors that need to be addressed: Rumsfeld was not US Secretary of Defense during the Gulf War. Overall "The Weight of a Mustard Seed" is a compelling descent into the terrible years of Saddam Hussein's Iraq and how ordinary and even not-so-ordinary Iraqi Arabs coped.