Letting Slip the Dogs of War.

There have been a number of cases in both Britain and America over the last few years about service personnel in war zones abusing, torturing and even murdering civilians. This shouldn’t surprise anybody. Such behaviour has been a normal part of war for as long as wars have been fought. The Romans even celebrated the fact, as Trajan’s Column illustrates. Fortunately, the public is a little less accepting of such things these days, which leads me to wonder about the cases that are reported. Although I have no evidence, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if they are no more than the tip of an iceberg, a few token cases allowed to be revealed so that the public thinks they are isolated incidents and the perpetrators are being properly called to book.

The fact is that war strips away the veneer of civilised attitudes and behaviour to which civilians are habituated; and when that happens, what is revealed underneath is often ugly. I’ve witnessed it personally a couple of times in my life, in situations of aggression or high excitement. I saw a profound change come over men’s eyes, and it disturbed me. And it seems that soldiers are trained to let that veneer slip away very easily when the occasion demands.

I watched some interviews once, with soldiers who had been involved in the conflicts in The Falklands, Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan. Let me quote one typical conversation. The soldier, a sniper in Afghanistan, said:

‘I lined him up in my sights and pulled the trigger. I saw half his head disappear as it exploded.’

‘And how did you feel?’ asked the interviewer.

‘Elated. It’s the job I’d been trained to do, and I’d just done it well.’

‘Did it concern you that you had just killed a human being?’

‘Not at all. I didn’t see him as a human being. He was a just a target and I took it down.’

‘Do you feel any remorse now for the fact that you’ve taken so many human lives?’

‘Of course not. They weren’t humans; they were the enemy.’

This doesn’t appear to relate directly to the abuse of civilians, but I would suggest that there is a real connection. If you train people to forego their respect for human life, the side effects are surely predictable. It’s why discharged infantrymen are often a problem to society.

So should we excuse their behaviour and regard them merely as victims? I don’t think so. People must still be held accountable for their actions to some degree, even when those actions are triggered by strong conditioning. But I also think we shouldn’t stop at blaming the soldiers. To me, the primary responsibility for the abuse, torture and murder of civilians, lies with the politicians who start wars. They know, or should know, what happens when you do that. It’s why I consider it somewhat ironic that Tony Blair is giving the royalties from his latest book to a charity for injured servicemen. I wonder whether he feels some belated responsibility for their plight, and I further wonder whether he realises how far beyond the members of his own army that sense of responsibility should go.