Jim's Brain Online

As Ed mentioned, I have been fearing the possibility of our troops abusing Iraqis for a while. This is not because I expect our troops specifically to do such things. It's the result of my taking an undergraduate course in social psychology during college.

In the interest of honesty, I must admit that haven't specifically been expecting such news out of prisons. I've been thinking of our soldiers' position in Iraq as being similar to guards in a a prison. They have power. The people of the occupied country don't have much. In some, power does corrupt.

The unfortunate thing is that corruption in a power structure has a way of ensnaring people. I remember watching a documentary film about the process of creating torturers in Greece during a particularly bad period in Greek history. First they had people (who had never tortured before) guard outside the torture room, then later guard inside, and after that they had them take part themselves.

People have a tendency to follow orders and when desensitized to violence, ordinary, decent people have been known to do horrible things.

Thus, some relatively unsupervised people have the power to create a culture in which causing hurt to Iraqis is expected. The prisons, in this case, happened to be unsupervised enough and may have been under a certain amount of pressure from above to make life unpleasant for the Iraqis under their control.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record on this issue, if we had more troops there (whether US or UN) this might not have happened. Stretch your resources thin and you probably get more of this sort of abuse.