Heaneyland!

War and yeesh

I've been sort of avoiding blogging about the whole business of U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi detainees, because it just fills me with such fury I can hardly think straight.

Of course, that's not the only emotion it fills me with. Sure, when I hear that people in the military have known about the abuse for months, I'm livid that they did nothing to stop it...but I'm also baffled. Like, I tend to assume that Rumsfeld et al. are all Machiavellians -- so wouldn't it be obvious to everyone that if abuses were occurring in Iraq, they needed to be stopped immediately to avoid the sort of PR disaster they're experiencing now? Even if they care nothing for human rights (which they're not doing a very good job of disproving), how could they be so short of enlightened self-interest to let this sit so long?

And also on the enlightened self-interest tip, how boneheaded is it for Bush not to ask for Rumsfeld's resignation? To say, well, mistakes were made, but Rummy's doing a great job -- if there's anyone alive for whom the current administration didn't already seem like a crony system where the only thing rewarded is loyalty, well, this has probably helped them start to see things that way. Or so I can hope.

The New York Times' strongly-worded editorials have been somewhat cathartic, but then I learn something new and I get aggravated all over again.

Torin Nelson, who served as a military intelligence officer at Guantánamo Bay before moving to Abu Ghraib as a private contractor last year, blamed the abuses on a failure of command in US military intelligence and an over-reliance on private firms. He alleged that those companies were so anxious to meet the demand for their services that they sent "cooks and truck drivers" to work as interrogators.

[snip]

"A unit goes out on a raid and they have a target and the target is not available; they just grab anybody because that was their job," Mr Nelson said, referring to counter-insurgency operations in Iraq. "The troops are under a lot of stress and they don't know one guy from the next. They're not cultural experts. All they want is to count down the days and hopefully go home. They take it out on the nearest person they can't understand."

"I've read reports from capturing units where the capturing unit wrote, "the target was not at home. The neighbour came out to see what was going on and we grabbed him," he said.

According to Mr Nelson's account, the victims' very innocence made them more likely to be abused, because interrogators refused to believe they could have been picked up on such arbitrary grounds.

For lots, lots more on these matters, I second Columbine's recommendation that you check out Respectful of Otters, who makes this excellent point, among others:

Which brings me to the Stanford Prison Experiment, which my brother, among others, has urged me to write about here. In the 1970s, a social psychologist named Phil Zimbardo converted the basement of a Stanford building into a makeshift prison and randomly assigned psychologically healthy young men to play "prisoners" and "guards." Within days, a sick and abusive "guard" culture had developed, and "prisoners" had become cowed and submissive. Zimbardo actually had to stop the study after six days because the abusive behavior of the "guards" had gotten so far out of control. (I'm not going to discuss his repellent lack of experimental ethics, except to say that no one would be allowed to do this study today.)

What does the Stanford experiment tell us about Abu Ghraib? I don't think it absolves the low-level MPs from moral responsibility, but it should steer us away from explanations which depend on their moral exceptionality. The Stanford experiment tells us that there needn't have been anything psychologically or morally deficient about these MPs at the outset of the war, just as the "guards" in Zimbardo's experiment were psychologically indistinguishable from "prisoners" when the study began.

If anything, the Stanford study damns the leadership of the 800th MP Brigade even further than they've already been damned. We know that, in the absence of continuous training, supervision, and strict controls, people given absolute power over others will tend to become vicious. No one in that chain of command has any business acting surprised that their failures of leadership led to exactly what anyone who's taken Psych 101 at any time since the mid-1970s could have predicted.

Indeed. If we harbored any honest hopes of bringing democracy to Iraq, we had a responsibility not to abdicate our responsibility to treat Iraqis as fellow human beings; the lack of oversight is appalling.

Arrrrrgh. Enough of that. We return you to our regularly scheduled obsessive discussion of pop music arcana.

Posted by Francis at 12:26 AM