The Weight of a Mustard Seed

Run! Split up!” But the rest of the prisoners were struck dumb and paralyzed by the authority of the system in which they found themselves shackled (although unshackled) and did not move.

Ahmed’s conspiracy theory was wrong, but maybe no more trite than its opposite: that democracy could be imposed by force. It was only the inverse of an opposite set of beliefs, scorn and reaction, like two presidents calling each other “evil.” All of us grow up in a community, a society, a country that feels, to us, safe and familiar; outside, across the sea, somewhere else, reside the dragons of the other. Ahmed had absorbed the mores and opinions of his community: family was honor, Islam was right, the larger world was a conspiracy that kept Muslims and Arabs down

If Iraq had taught me anything it was the complexity of reactions to events and ideals and isms contained within each human mind. Iraqis carried the scars and memories of good and bad and mad and sad and bits of Baathism, globs of pride and an inferiority complex; they carried Koranic surahs in their heads along with the precepts of grandfathers, memories of war slogans and the chorus of a Britney Spears song. Fractious, miasmic and changeable: Communist to Baathist. Jingo to war weary. Religious to skeptic. Fanatic to cynic. History doesn’t necessarily progress, and people don’t follow straight-line lives either.

times my long running narrative quest for how-why seemed moot against the twisted fragments of news that came out of Baghdad those summer months: triangular battles between Al-Qaeda factions, Sunni tribal insurgents and Americans, Shia-on-Shia fighting in Amara, militia gang turf war in Basra. “Civil war” was almost a polite euphemism.

Special handling for those prisoners who could pay or display wasta, letters from the Presidential Office or from Ministers who asked for preferential treatment for relatives or the children of friends. Prisoners with pull had access to money, food, television, luxurious double cells all to themselves, drugs; sometimes even wives were allowed to stay overnight.

he folded his arms against his chest, flat and defensive, I thought I could discern guilt—no, not guilt, that would have been impossible, too devastating to admit, to articulate, to allow, to even suspect. I looked carefully: hoped I could see that there were things that were difficult to think about because there might be chinks of unease in them, things which he hid from himself, an emotion folded between the images of a lost memory—but I suspected that this was my own imposition, wishful thinking. In general we had a nice friendly chat, and who among those Arabs, single men, mostly, along the Edgware Road, that day or any day, did not have scarred souls, long journeys, complicated motives and the shadows that accompany lives that have been lived between tribe-dictator father, bride fight-flight and the internal-external dichotomy, the face shown to the world and the unacknowledged private ego.

exiles the return was salutary. They knew it would be bad, they had talked to relatives and watched the news, but when they saw, with their own eyes, the extent of the collapse—Iraq reduced to third world; it looked like Africa! Rackety generators, lakes of sewage, ragged kids in the streets, mounds of fly blown garbage, lumpen empty tracts of construction scarred suburb, and so many women covered in black! And where were the old bars and the restaurants they used to go to? Where was the life? The park along the river where they remembered family picnics and fish restaurants was now unkempt and blocked by two American tanks and coils of razor wire.

Human nature is the same,” he said. “People are not good because they are taught in school to be good, there is a cultural impact over generations to make people comply, certain things are not acceptable, these norms are sanctioned under authority…Iraqis are repressed and exposed to violence; it’s not strange to see what is happening now.

Solzhenitsyn said that there is a line separating good from evil that runs through every man.”

Milgram found that the social context, the effect of “peers” creating a group reaction, could counteract the general determination to obey authority, but over the years the experiment has been repeated in different countries and cultures with different age and socioeconomic groups. Most people, when asked in polls, don’t believe that anyone would continue shocking a civilian “learner” just because they were told to do so by someone wearing a white coat