Free The Weight of a Mustard Seed by Wendell Steavenson

Hamdani compared and contrasted and came to the conclusion that Baathism was like an Arab version of communism. It was socialist with an emphasis on Pan-Arabism, a kind of internationalist dream. “People like my father,” Hamdani observed with respectful hindsight, “knew this was impossible, a fantasy.”
    Yes, of course there were good things about the Baath Party. They focused on the eradication of illiteracy and built schools and spent money sending graduates to America and Europe to study. They tried to diversify the economy away from a dependence on oil and agriculture into state owned manufacturing. And they encouraged the advancement of women in a secular way…
    But they did not allow other ideas to surface. One ideology and one party; narrowed after Saddam’s takeover in 1979 to one man. Hamdani, as many educated Arabs often are, was contemptuous of the Arab mindset. “Arabs are not stupid, no, but our Eastern society is a society in which ideas are imposed, either on a tribal or a religious level. The Sheikh imposes or the Imam imposes. It is a society formed by a shepherd into a flock of sheep. Our first thought is not like in the West, to judge for ourselves or to assess something, our first thought should be, aswe are brought up to defer, ‘What would the religious leader think?’ or ‘What will the tribal leader think?’ I owe my father for teaching me a different way: I think by myself. But that’s what the Baath Party did. Instead of a tribal leader you were given a Baathie superior. The politicians came and took the role of the tribal elder and the religious leader. Saddam Hussein was very smart. But he didn’t give others around him any chance to think. He believed he should think for everyone.”
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    P ERHAPS S ADDAM WANTED to end the war in 1982, but Khomeini would not let go. Over the next years of campaign he harried the Iraqis, tried to cut the Baghdad-Basra road, invaded the Fao peninsula and supported the Kurdish Peshmerga fighters skirmishing in the mountains in the North. The Iraqis had air superiority and better weapons, the Iranians had greater numbers and green-headband fervor. The Iranians attacked, the Iraqis counterattacked—increasingly using poison gas as a force multiplier. Battles waxed and waned from the desert to the mountains along a 1,600 kilometer front, battles piled on top of each other, campaigns rolled over themselves, repeating, year after year, ground taken, ground lost, count the dead, count the wounded, withdraw, push forward or, more usually, stand in a trench and be shelled.
    This continued, hundreds of thousands dead, hundreds of thousands prisoners, hundreds of thousands wounded (no one knows the real numbers) for eight years. Hamdani would sit in his tank at night and read by map light. His heroes were the German Second World War tankists: Guderian, von Manstein and Rommel.
    â€œThere is no evidence of a country benefiting from a long war.” Hamdani quoted from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War . “TheIran-Iraq war was like the First World War in Europe: trenches, continuous clashes, more clashes than actual maneuvers, we repeated the Somme, and because there were many clashes there were many victories mixed in with failures and defeats.” Hamdani quoted Churchill (“a genius when it came to wisdom!”): “War is many battles and many maneuvers, but the successful general is the one who has more maneuvers than battles.”
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    T HE FIRST TIME Hamdani came across Kamel Sachet was in 1981 at the battle of Seif Said.
    Seif Said is a mountain on the border where Iraq’s waist narrows to Iran. It was a strategic height: from its summit plateau, 2000 meters up, it was possible to see, through a telescope, the outskirts of Baghdad 100 kilometers away. In January the Iranians attacked the Iraqi garrison entrenched on the top. It was raining and cold and the mountain was a fissured mass of