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Get Four
|  | MAY 18, 2004
By Thane Peterson "The Environment Creates the Atrocity" [Page 2 of 2] Q: But some people did refuse to go along. What's different about them? A: You're right to focus on that because it's a very hopeful phenomenon. I once interviewed for many hours a man who had been at My Lai and who had refused to fire. He pointed his gun to the ground and made it very clear to everybody that he wasn't firing [at the My Lai villagers]. That made him a little fearful that the other soldiers might turn on him because the pressure toward atrocity can become so great that the person who in some way counters it may become vulnerable to the disdain or even violence of the group. Psychologically, there were three sources to his restraint. One was a certain religious conscience from his Catholic background. Second, a sense of being a loner and, therefore, not so easily influenced by the group. But the third was the most interesting and perhaps the most important factor -- his sense of military honor prevented him from firing. It turns out that he was a man who had had trouble finding himself in life, entered the military, loved it, excelled, and planned to make it his career -- and then was appalled by what he found in Vietnam and at My Lai in particular. This was a violation of his military idealism. In Iraq, we don't know exactly the motivations of those who resisted the atrocity-producing situation, but I think that this notion of military honor could turn out to be important. Q: What are the psychological forces behind the Iraqi attacks on Americans? A: My sense is that there's a resistance and insurgency now that's many-sided, confused, and often chaotic. Nobody knows all the components of it. Surely, there are Islamist extremists coming in from outside seeking to find a battleground, and there's also a resistance [among many Iraqis] to our presence as an occupying power. It's really when a counterinsurgency war [involves] an occupation that you're likely to have not only resistance but perpetual atrocity-producing situations. It doesn't seem likely that this psychological motivation for resistance will go away as long as we're present in a powerful position in Iraq. Q: What's the likely effect of the publication of the photos of prisoners being tortured and humiliated? A: It taints the war effort. There had been growing doubt about the war, and these pictures are already causing those doubts to intensify. There's a sense that we have gotten into something very dirty that we can't control, and that in certain aspects of that situation we're behaving very badly. That [may make] the war seem less noble than we thought and not worth fighting. But there can also be the opposite reaction: That we shouldn't make such a fuss about it, that [the prisoners] are nasty people. The beheading of the American [businessman] Nicholas Berg clearly evokes the extremity of the other side, in this case al Qaeda. The country is divided between these two views. They both represent what I call "survivor meaning" or "survivor mission" in relation to American deaths in Iraq and to the atrocities we're seeing on the part of Americans in Iraq. Q: Is that one reason President Bush remains relatively popular in opinion polls? A: There's a psychological tendency of any people to rally round the flag when there's war and one's own [people] are dying. There's a very strong impulse to believe and commit oneself to the principle that they didn't die in vain. It's a traditional survivor mission in relation to war that will continue to have enormous power for Americans. But there's also an alternative mission in which one questions the war and warmaking. It's as if there's a struggle between the two. Q: Are we at a tipping point? A: It's hard to know where the tipping point is. I think these prison scandals will have an enormous effect, which is only beginning now. Because of the information coming out and all the investigations under way, it's impossible to limit the scandal to the level of the foot soldiers. There are too many forces pressing for it to be opened out, too much information suggesting [responsibility] at higher levels. Q: You've mentioned Vietnam. Are there also parallels in Iraq to World War II? Rightly or wrongly, many Americans connect Iraq to 9/11, and the nation was attacked on 9/11, just as it was at Pearl Harbor. A: I agree with you that 9/11 is a very important psychological factor in what we have done [in Iraq]. But our response to the attack, rather than being focused and with limited use of violence, became amorphous and generalized when Iraq was thrown into the war on terrorism even though there wasn't any evidence that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11. But the psychology of Americans, partly manipulated by the government, was more open to intense or extreme measures in interrogation and in fighting terrorism because we were attacked.
 Peterson is a contributing editor at BusinessWeek Online. Follow his weekly Moveable Feast column, only on BusinessWeek Online Edited by Patricia O'Connell Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | |
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