May 16, 2009
IN THE END, IT ONLY MATTERS THAT ONE MAN RESISTED IT:
Decline and Fall: THE WEIGHT OF A MUSTARD SEED: The Intimate Story of an Iraqi General and His Family During Thirty Years of Tyranny By Wendell Steavenson (ROBERT F. WORTH, NY Times Book Review)
One of the many sad facets of Iraq’s descent into sectarian warfare has been the loss of a proper reckoning with the recent past. Over the last five years, journalists and Iraqis alike have been too busy chronicling — and surviving — the horrors of the present conflict to spend much time thinking about Saddam Hussein’s murderous quarter-century in power. This is a shame, not just because Iraqis need a chance to rest and confront their history, but also because the violence that erupted after 2003 made limited sense to those who did not live through its prelude. Too much American reporting from Iraq reads like the dispatches of a group of astronauts on a vicious foreign planet, leavened only by bland historical paragraphs about the Sunnis and the Shiites and their regrettable hatreds.So it’s a relief to read Wendell Steavenson’s “Weight of a Mustard Seed,” a masterly and elegantly told story that weaves together the Iraqi past and present. Her subject is Kamel Sachet, an Iraqi general and war hero who came to despise Hussein, and was finally executed in 1999. Steavenson, a journalist who has written for many English and American publications, set herself a difficult task: Sachet died long before she ever set foot in Iraq. The country began to implode soon after she arrived in 2003, making it even harder to piece together his life. But she succeeds, and makes his story a powerful inquiry into the moral question at the heart of Hussein’s Iraq and so many other dictatorships: Why did people go along with it? Did any resist? And if so, what made them different?
W. Those who opposed the war were just going along with it.