War - Depravity = ??
You don't need me to tell you that the story of Iraqi abuse and humiliation by US soldiers is getting worse. I truly believed the first known incidents, as originally reported, were extremely isolated. I was wrong about that. Not only is this failure apparently deeper and wider than we've seen to date--Sy Hersh is warning that there is much much more--it was a scandal known about by military leaders for months. Even when the story was on the verge of breaking, and after all the lessons we've supposedly learned over the last 40 years, the military instinct would still seem to try and keep the truth from coming out, even keeping it from the Defense Secretary and the President.

It's too bad that "Nightline" does not post transcripts online. I caught the end of the show tonight, and they were discussing this prison incident in light of the Milgram Experiement, which Mark has told me about before. In that experiment, Dr. Milgram demonstrated the human capacity to cause pain, at very high levels, and at obvious odds with our own values, when under the cover of obedience to authority. Whether we like it or not, according to Milgram's report, "The Perils of Obedience," the response is a normal one:

"The ordinary person who shocked the victim did so out of a sense of obligation -- an impression of his duties as a subject -- and not from any peculiarly aggressive tendencies.

This is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority."

The role that authority and orders played in the display of depravity at Abu Ghreib prison is unclear. And I'm not trying to excuse anyone's behavior--far from it. But there is a related lesson we (humans) should have learned by now: the structure and the stresses of war bring horrible consequences. It does awful things to the defeated. It does awful things to the victorious. And is no friend of those in between.

Now, we are trying to understand what controls need to be put in place, what punishment to hand out, to allow us to wage this war in Iraq with more dignity, and less shame. But I remain unconvinced that war can be played at all on the field of dignity, the only terrain deserving of the truest human spirit. They must be prosecuted, and their violations of decency not tolerated, but the real problem here is not that we have a stream of bad acts perpetrated by bad people. The real problem is war, plain and simple. We are just not made to withstand its toll and uphold our greater nature. We can learn to do it better, and no doubt we have. But that accomplishment will not shine on us like the step of learning how to avoid war in the first place. I wish we could spend as much time on the latter as we do on the former.

{MORE: For info on a different experiment which may make an even better analogy, read about the Stanford Prison Experiment.}