Bloody repression: business as usual for Iraqis

Most books about Iraq published in the US and Britain since the invasion of 2003 turn out to have disappointingly little about Iraqis and a great deal about the Americans and British. The assumption is that the occupying powers make the political weather in Iraq while Iraqis remain firmly in the background.

In the first months of the occupation a prime reason why the first US viceroy Paul Bremer made so many disastrous mistakes - such as dissolving the Iraqi army - was that at heart he did not believe that what Iraqis said or did was going to count for very much.

This attitude was to change as anti-American guerrilla warfare erupted and it became clear that the US controlled only islands of territory, but right up to the present moment the outside world remains extraordinarily ignorant about what makes Iraqis tick.
    
Iraqis often complain to me that this ignorance stems from the American belief that 'Iraqi history began in 2003'. Proponents and opponents of the war have always been far too prone to see all developments as flowing from US actions. But the US and British invasion was only the latest act of a tragedy that began at least a quarter of a century earlier.

An invaluable aspect of Wendell Steavenson's fascinating The Weight of a Mustard Seed (Atlantic, £14.99) is that it vividly describes how Iraqis were shaped by bloody wars and savage repression long before the invasion.
    
The book revolves around the career of a single Iraqi, a war hero named General Kamel Sachet. Regarded by Iraqis as a brave and upright man, Sachet first prospered under Saddam and then, in the dying days of the regime, was killed by him.

A policeman turned soldier, Sachet was a Sunni Muslim with all the right credentials for rising to the top in Saddam's Iraq. A famously heroic and aggressive commander in the Iran-Iraq war - though like many other Iraqi heroes of the conflict he was briefly jailed - he was the sort of man whom Saddam needed but also distrusted.

This distrust grew deeper in the wake of defeat in Kuwait as Sachet became more and more religious, asking his family to live by a strict Islamic code and establishing fundamentalist mosques: the tide of religious militancy was rising long before the Americans arrived.

As the regime grew weaker, it became ever more dangerous, eliminating all potential opponents - often before there was any sign of real opposition. Five years before Saddam Hussein was overthrown, Kamel Sachet was brought one morning to the rubbish dump of Abu Ghraib prison and shot to death. His family were denied permission for a funeral.
    
It's an exemplary story: ever since 1980 Iraqis have lived in a state of hot or cold war. The eight years of the war with Iran left half a million dead, wounded and prisoners. This was immediately followed by military disaster in Kuwait; the Shia and Kurdish uprisings; and the 13 years of sanctions which amounted to an economic siege of the country. These catastrophes destroyed Iraq's economy and shattered Iraqi society. Millions of Iraqis who had enjoyed comfortable careers were impoverished.  

Iraqis over a certain age cannot help but have interesting life stories

In describing the career of Kamel Sachet, at first a beneficiary of Baathist rule and later its bitter and alienated victim, Steavenson gives a vivid sense of the experiences which produced the Iraq into which America blundered. I remember an Iraqi neurosurgeon saying to me just after the looting of Baghdad that "the Americans should remember that even Saddam had difficulty ruling this place".
     
Steavenson has written a fast-paced account of her search for the general's family, friends and fellow officers and her investigation of the dark world in which they lived. It used to be said of people over a certain age in the Soviet Union that they could not help but have interesting life stories, and the same is true of Iraqis.

Steavenson skilfully creates a picture of the life of men and women, most of whom were once supported by Saddam and have seen their world destroyed. ·