Books and Arts; Book Review;Iraq under Saddam；Only obeying orders；
文艺；书评；萨达姆治下的伊拉克；唯命是从；

The Weight of a Mustard Seed: The Intimate Story of an Iraqi General and His Family During Thirty Years of Tyranny，By Wendell Steavenson
《一粒荠菜籽的重量：一个伊拉克将军和他的家庭在三十年暴政时期的亲密故事》，温德尔·史蒂文森著。

Why did so many apparently decent Iraqis serve Saddam Hussein so loyally for so many years? An American-British reporter, Wendell Steavenson, has interviewed a score or more of Iraqi soldiers, from sergeants to generals, trawling through their life histories to find an answer. In particular, she befriends the family of a brave general, Kamel Sachet Aziz al-Janabi, delving into his life story through his wife, several of his nine children and numerous friends and admirers.
为什么在那么多的年月里，会有那么多看起来很正直的伊拉克人对萨达姆是那样的忠心耿耿呢？为了找到答案，美裔英籍记者温德尔·史蒂文森采访了二十多名伊拉克军人，其中既有中士也有将军，深入了解了他们的人生经历。值得一提的是，她还为英勇的将军卡米尔·萨西尔·阿齐兹·阿尔-贾纳比的家人提供了热心帮助，并通过他的妻子、9个孩子中的几个以及众多朋友和崇拜者，对他的人生传奇进行了探寻。

Only later does the reader discover that he was one of countless Iraqis executed by Saddam, for reasons that never become clear, in his case only a few years before the Americans toppled the dictator. General Sachet emerges as a fundamentally honest and upright, though occasionally ruthless and intellectually limited, soldier who turns to religion, like so many other Iraqis, as the regime putrefies. His family is battered. Though its members have every cause to celebrate Saddam's demise, most of them sympathise with—and some of them actively support—the anti-American insurgency that was still rife as this book went to print.
然而随后读者就发现，他是被萨达姆处决的无数伊拉克人之一，而原因一直不明不白。他是在美国推倒萨达姆独裁政权仅仅几年前被处死的。萨西尔将军给人的感觉是一名比较老实、正直的军人，但偶尔也会显示出残忍和不够聪明的一面。随着伊拉克政体的败落，像许多其他伊拉克人一样，他也加入了宗教。他的家庭现已破落不堪，可尽管他的家人完全有理由为萨达姆的死而欢庆，然而对于在该书行将付梓之时仍旧愈演愈烈的反美暴乱事件，他们中大多数人却持赞同态度，有的甚至予以了积极支持。

Ms Steavenson seeks to examine the inner lives of other Iraqi military men. She relentlessly tracks them down to their abodes of exile in Abu Dhabi, Amman, Beirut, Damascus and London. After a while, there is a dispiritingly drab sameness about their stories. In short, you had to lie to survive. Perhaps the most honest in his reflections is a doctor who became a senior officer in the medical corps. “You had to lie against your principles. You had to say things you did not believe. It was mental conflict. To live 35 years like this. It becomes a personality trait.”
史蒂文森试图探查其他伊拉克军人的内心世界。不屈不挠的她循着他们的踪迹，找到了他们流放至迪拜、安曼、贝鲁特、大马士革以及伦敦后的住所。交谈不一会儿，她便感到气馁了，因为他们的故事千篇一律，单调而乏味。简单点说就是，每个人都不得不靠撒谎活下去。一名后来成为医疗部队高级军官的医生对往事的反思或许最为实在。“你不得不违背原则地说谎，说一些你不相信的事情，这是一种心理矛盾。35年都是这样活过来的，它已经成为一种个性特征。”

All those interviewed have tales of horror. Just about all of them witness summary executions: of enemy soldiers (mainly Iranians), of Kurds, of Kuwaitis, of Iraqi deserters, of senior Iraqi officers who are deemed to have been guilty of losing battles or even merely of retreating when they should have stayed to fight and die. General Sachet is ordered to oversee such executions. A sergeant witnesses an Iraqi, who was alleged to have abused a woman in Kuwait, hauled up by a crane to be shot by fellow Iraqi soldiers. The same happens to an Iraqi colonel caught smuggling gold. Kuwaiti prisoners have their ears nailed to a plank of wood.
所有被采访者都经历过恐怖的事情。几乎所有人都目睹过处决现场，被处决的有敌军（主要是伊朗人），有库尔德人，有科威特人，有伊军的逃兵，也有因为打败仗或者因为本该战斗到死却撤退而被认定有罪的伊拉克高级将领。萨西尔将军受命监督了这些处决过程。一个伊拉克人被指控曾在科威特对一妇女施虐，一位中士亲眼见到他被吊在起重机上然后伊拉克士兵开枪把他击毙。一位走私黄金被抓的伊拉克上校也有同样的遭遇。科威特战俘的耳朵则被钉在厚厚的木板上。

A former bodyguard of Saddam's describes, admiringly, how he saw the dictator taking out his revolver and “shooting between the eyes” one of his own relatives who had taken a younger wife and had rejected the president's request to go back to his original one. A relation of General Sachet tells how Qusay Saddam Hussein, the dictator's son, gave an order to kill 2,000 prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison (which became notorious for abuses during the early years of the American occupation) to relieve overcrowding.
一名萨达姆前任贴身护卫描述了他看到的这位独裁者拔出左轮手枪，朝自己的一名亲戚开枪并“打中眉心”的情景，言语中流露出钦佩之意。那人娶了一名年轻的妻子，而总统要求他回到他原来的妻子身边但被他拒绝了。萨西尔将军的一个亲戚说，这位独裁者的儿子乌赛·萨达姆·侯赛因曾下令杀死阿布格莱布监狱的2000名囚犯，以减轻监狱人满为患的压力。（在美国占领伊拉克的头几年，阿布格莱布监狱曾因虐囚事件变得臭名昭著。）

Perhaps most dispiriting of all, virtually none of those interviewed acknowledges responsibility for what was done. Most of their explanations are variations on “we were only obeying orders”. “What could I do?” “But I helped people, many people!” “I suffered also, you know.” “This was usual then.” The gassing of 5,000 Kurds in Halabja was, concedes a seemingly upright general, “a political mistake”.
或许最令人气馁的是，事实上没有一个受访者承认对自己的所作所为负有责任。他们的辩解说来道去，大多都是“我们只是在执行命令”，“我有什么办法呢？”“但我还是帮了人的，很多人！”，“你知道的，我也很痛苦。”一名似乎还算正直的将军说，在哈拉布甲用毒气杀害5000名库尔德人的事件，“是一个政治错误”。

“I liked them. I joked with them. I sympathised with them,” writes Ms Steavenson. “But not one ever looked me straight in the eye and admitted responsibility for the crimes of the government which they had served.” Even after the depredations of Saddam Hussein, many of those Ms Steavenson talked to still hankered after someone like him. Iraqis, says one, are “an unruly mass of shirugi—slang for thick-headed Marsh Arabs—who need the rule of the rod, a strongman, to control them.” Judging by this remorselessly bleak account of Iraq's moral collapse, one cannot but feel squeamish about Iraq's future, under any regime.
“我喜欢他们，和他们一起开玩笑，我同情他们，”史蒂文森写道，“但是没有一个人直视过我的眼睛，承认他们对自己曾经效忠的政府所犯下的罪行负有责任。”尽管受尽萨达姆的蹂躏，接受史蒂文森访谈的许多人依然渴望以后还能有像他那样的人出现。有一个人说，伊拉克人是“一群不守规矩的shirugi（俚语，指愚笨的沼地阿拉伯人），需要棒压统治，需要一名强势之人来管住他们。”伊拉克的道德崩溃竟然会有一个如此无情、黯淡的注脚，我们不禁要为伊拉克的未来捏一把汗了，不管它是怎样的政体。