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Get Four
|  | MAY 18, 2004
By Thane Peterson "The Environment Creates the Atrocity" Comparing Abu Ghraib to My Lai in Vietnam, psychologist Robert Jay Lifton explains how ordinary Americans can behave so horribly Renowned psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, who has spent his long career studying war and extremist political movements, is in a unique position to comment on the situation in Iraq. As a young Air Force psychiatrist during the early 1950s, he treated pilots traumatized during the Korean War. He went on to win a National Book Award in 1969 for Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, and he has also published psychological studies of everything from Nazi doctors to Vietnam War veterans to Aum Shinrikyo, the extremist Japanese cult that released poison gas in the Tokyo subway system in 1995. All told, he has written 18 books and edited a half-dozen more. Now a visiting professor at Harvard Medical School, Lifton has been preoccupied in recent years with the September 11 terrorist attacks and their aftermath -- what he describes as "the interaction between Islamist extremism and the American reaction" (Lifton uses the term "Islamist" to distinguish radical fundamentalist groups from the Islamic religion generally). In his latest book, Superpower Syndrome: America's Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World, which came out in fall, 2003, he describes the war in Iraq as a confrontation between American and Islamist "apocalyptic visions" aimed at reforming and remaking the world order. He strongly opposed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, which he thinks undermined the focus and support for the war on terrorism. On May 16, his 78th birthday, I caught up with Lifton by phone and asked him for his perspective on the insurgency, prison scandals, and other events in Iraq. Here are edited excerpts of our conversation: Q: You speak in your book about "atrocity-producing situations." Would that idea apply to the current situation in Iraq? A: It applies very specifically. I originally observed [that concept at work] in relation to Vietnam, specifically the mass killing [in 1968] of civilians in the small Vietnamese village of My Lai. Elements of the atrocity-producing situation there included free-fire zones, where soldiers could fire at anyone, and body counts in which there was competition for the most kills. When they entered that environment, individual soldiers -- ordinary people no better or worse than you or me -- were capable of committing atrocities. Even though Iraq is very different from Vietnam, it's also a counterinsurgency war in which there's a lot of fear and uncertainty about who the enemy is and how to pin him down. An average person entering into that Abu Graib prison environment would be capable of committing atrocities because he or she was entering an atrocity-producing situation. From that standpoint, atrocities are not so much an individual expression as a group expression. The environment, which creates enormous pressures on the individual, creates the atrocity. It's true that you get atrocities and atrocity-producing situations in all wars, including the last so-called good war [World War II]. But it's in counterinsurgency wars, which take place in alien territory with confusion about who's the enemy and with hostility from the people, that you're most likely to get sustained atrocity-producing situations. We saw those in Vietnam -- and we're seeing them in Iraq. Q: So are you saying that an average office worker like me could commit atrocities, too? A: Yes, I'm saying you or I or any average person might be capable of committing atrocities.
BW MALL
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