CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

A similar view is taken by Philip Zimbardo * , who argues convincingly that the results
of his celebrated 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment 63 , could have predicted the outcome
at Abu Ghraib. 64 The crux of his argument is that such events are not simply a matter of
‘a few bad apples but of a rotten barrel’, that is to say that it is situational factors rather
than individual psychological ones that lead to such outcomes. He notes, for instance,
that the soldiers found culpable at Abu Ghraib were not regulars but reservists and thus
were less thoroughly imbued in military ethos; their units were undermanned,
individuals were working long shifts with little rest in between, and they were living in
grossly unpleasant conditions. Thus the decision to employ inadequate numbers of
soldiers – whether out of cost-, risk- or casualty-aversion – was a significant factor in
the gross immorality at Abu Ghraib. The official US report into detainee abuses, The
Schlesinger Report, 65 arrives at conclusions that would also support this view.
Similar arguments about situational factors have been advanced to explain the massacre
by US Marines at Haditha in November 2005. Originally claimed to be victims of the
same road-side bomb that killed a marine, the 24 civilians (including 11 women and
children) were later described by US official reports as accidental victims of the ensuing
fire-fight with insurgents. Subsequently, however, evidence emerged that they may
have been entirely innocent victims of an indiscriminate shooting spree by the highly-
charged marines following the attack that had killed their colleague. Several US
Marines have now been charged with murder. Don MacCuish of the US Air
University contends that, as with Abu Ghraib, Haditha resulted from institutional rather
than simply individual failures, not least the failure to deploy sufficient troops properly
to deal with the level of insurgency being encountered. He points out that ‘the unit was
on its third deployment to Iraq in 2½ years and during its previous deployment, seven
months prior to the November incident, the company was one of the lead Marine units
in the Battle of Falluja at which time 30 members of the battalion were killed.’ 66 .
Moreover, whilst not directly relevant to the argument of this section, he points to
descriptions in a BBC report of the marines’ living conditions in the ‘decaying rabbit
warren of Haditha Dam’ as being ‘feral’. 67 Again, as with Abu Ghraib, too few troops,
* In addition to the relevance of his Stanford Prison Experiment, Zimbardo was an expert witness for
Specialist Charles Graner who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his part in the Abu Ghraib abuses.
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