5. The Man in the White Coat

The experiments conducted in the early 1960s by the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram are a well-known demonstration of how authority can incite people to undertake heinous acts. Conducted soon after the 1961 trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, Milgram’s experiment showed how otherwise normal individuals could be instructed to commit horrific acts including torture and murder, if commanded to do so by a person of sufficient, even if feigned, authority.

But the experiment also illustrates a problem that pervades the current international system and the current practice of diplomacy. That problem has a name—amorality: the profoundly negative moral consequences of officials, in this case diplomats, of not taking responsibility for what they do. And as we shall see, it is not only a problem of diplomacy, it is a problem of any system that suppresses people’s sense of agency.

Milgram arranged a fake experiment whereby volunteers were instructed to give ever greater electric shocks to another participant in the experiment, unknown to the volunteer, an actor. As the subject failed to give correct answers to the instructor’s questions, the volunteer was told to give higher and higher electric shocks. As the shocks increased, the actor pretending to be the subject would bang on the wall in feigned agony, complain about his heart condition and, eventually, as the shocks increased to the normally fatal level of 450 volts, fall silent. If the volunteer hesitated in administering the electric shocks, a white-coated “instructor” (in reality, another actor) told the volunteer that they must continue. If at any time the unwitting volunteer asked to halt the experiment, he was told, successively, by the “instructor”:

1. Please continue.

2. The experiment requires that you continue.

3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.

4. You have no other choice, you must go on.

If the volunteer still wished to stop after all four successive verbal injunctions, the experiment was halted. Otherwise, it was halted after the volunteer had given the maximum 450-volt shock three times in succession. Of Milgram’s subjects, 65 percent (twenty-six out of forty) administered the experiment’s final—and theoretically fatal—450-volt shock. Only one participant refused to administer shocks before the 300-volt level. Notably, all were told during the experiment that they would not be held responsible for what happened.

Traditionally, and by Milgram himself, this experiment has been cited to demonstrate the pernicious effects of authority upon moral conduct. If people are told to do something awful by someone who is clearly in authority—in this case, a professorial type in a white coat—all too often they do it. But another lesson is also evident in the fact that the volunteers who administered the electric shocks, crucially, were told that they had no responsibility for the results.

The nasty human truth of Milgram’s experiment has been demonstrated many times in recent history. Mass warfare offers many examples. During World War II, German reservists were called up by the government to join regular military units but also police units, like Reserve Police Battalion 101. The members of this unit were “ordinary” men: teachers, bankers and plumbers drawn from a wide variety of backgrounds, from across Germany. As is the way with groups put into difficult circumstances together, the battalion quickly bonded into a close-knit team. The battalion was deployed to the Eastern Front, where it followed closely behind the Wehrmacht advance across Eastern Europe and into the Soviet Union.

The battalion was not recruited on any particular ideological basis, though some were also members of the Nazi party (a good percentage of Germans were at the time). But these were not Waffen-SS ideologues; they were largely middle-aged men with wives and families, gardens and pet dogs.

The battalion, in other words, was unexceptional, banal (as Hannah Arendt might have put it).[108] In a little over a year, this battalion of approximately five hundred “ordinary men” killed thirty-eight thousand Jews and dispatched approximately forty-five thousand more to extermination camps.[109] The battalion did most of its killing by shooting civilians at close range after rounding them up from villages and towns overrun by German forces. In the course of this murderous spree, not one member of the battalion questioned their orders or sought to leave the unit. When given the option by commanders to opt out of specific opportunities for mass murder, fewer than fifteen men of five hundred did so.

The Milgram experiments were recently repeated, to test how people today might submit to authority when ordered to inflict pain upon innocent others.[110] As reported in the journal American Psychologist, Professor Jerry Burger replicated part of the Milgram studies—but stopping at 150 volts, the moment at which the subject cries out to stop—to see whether people today would still obey.[111] There were some changes to account for modern ethical rules and social sensibilities. University ethics committees barred researchers from pushing the unwitting subjects through to an imaginary and “lethal” 450 volts, as Milgram did.

But despite these restrictions, the results were very much the same. As in the 1960s, more than half the participants agreed to proceed with the experiment past the 150-volt mark. Burger interviewed the participants afterwards and found that those who stopped generally believed themselves to be responsible for the shocks, whereas those who kept going tended to hold the experimenter accountable. This reveals a crucial distinction: It was the participants’ assumption for relinquishing of agency that determined their actions.

Milgram’s experiment is today so well known that it has entered the collective consciousness—but for the wrong reason. Although the experiment is generally viewed as demonstrating the pernicious effects of authority, in fact it reveals a more important truth: that when people feel no agency and no responsibility for their actions, they can commit horrific crimes. The Milgram experiment nevertheless seems remote from our normal lives. One problem with such an experiment is that it is hard to imagine ourselves in a situation where we would have to give electric shocks to an innocent person. But the uncomfortable truth is that such situations do not come announced; the chance to perform cruelty upon others comes disguised. I know this now because I was once in a position of one of Milgram’s test subjects, asked to inflict suffering upon others. Except in my case, unlike his experiment, the suffering was real.

For almost as long as I remember, I have wanted to be a diplomat. As a schoolboy, I read The Times (of London) every day, pretty much all the way through, gripped by its accounts of détente, the proxy wars between East and West and the terrifying, yet intriguing, calculus of nuclear war: first strikes, the “missile gap” and the strange but compelling logic of Mutually Assured Destruction. Thanks to inherited color-blindness, I couldn’t fulfill my original ambition to become a fighter pilot. The next best thing would be to become a diplomat and enter this weighty but arcane and closed world, to learn its terminologies and codes.

I was, moreover, fired by emotional urges. My family exuded a certain awe of “the Foreign Office” where British diplomats worked: Several relations had tried and failed to enter the elite ranks of the diplomatic corps. One childhood memory stands out. At perhaps age twelve, I announced to my family that I wanted to become a diplomat. My father, who later denied having said this, turned to me and said, “You have to be very clever to become a diplomat.” Thus was my ambition sealed.

University came and went. Eventually, I managed to enter the fast stream of the Foreign Office, a tiny group: some twenty-odd of the many thousands who applied. We were a chosen elite, given to expect that in due course we would become ambassadors and undersecretaries, the most senior exponents of our country’s wishes. I was elated to join this exclusive club and happy to undergo the many compromises membership in this group entailed.

Among them was the process that all new entrants must undertake in order to join the foreign service, and therein become party to the state’s secrets. “Positive vetting” is a deeply intrusive examination of friendships, family relations, habits and personal history designed to discover whether the proposed new diplomat poses any kind of security risk.

To check its prospective sharers of secrets, the Security Department of the Foreign Office assigned an investigator to examine my personal background, quiz acquaintances and friends, in order to find out whether my behavior, past or present, might render me vulnerable to approaches from foreign intelligence services. Without this clearance, the would-be diplomat cannot begin work since a great deal of work in the “office,” as it soon became known to me, involves access to Top Secret material, the compromise of which, in theory at least, poses a grave risk to the security of the state.

Others who had gone before told me that the process was straightforward “as long as you don’t tell them anything.” Unfortunately for me, my personal referees had already told my investigator various things, including the fact that I occasionally drank too much at university, played poker and that I was sharing a flat with a gay man. I took the naive view that since I had nothing in my life to be ashamed of, I would tell them the truth. This approach proved to be a serious mistake.

My vetting took place almost exactly as the Cold War was ending, in 1989. But the Foreign Office still feared the corrupting attentions of the KGB and others, and it was felt that being homosexual, which I am not, risked exposing the officer to blackmail. It did not seem to have occurred to the mandarins in charge of Security Department that a blanket prohibition on homosexuality was more likely to force serving or potential foreign service officers to lie about their true sexual natures and thus increase their vulnerability to blackmail. So my vetting officer subjected me to a long series of absurd and insulting questions about my sexuality, culminating in the conclusive, “So you’ve never been tempted off the straight and narrow, then?”

Meanwhile, my investigator had found out from application forms that my grandmother was Polish. Poland was at that time undergoing its transformation to democracy. But Security Department suspected, following policy, that the mere fact that I had Polish relations posed a security risk, since the KGB might “get at” them and use them to “get at” me (it had happened in the past when Poland was a vassal of the Soviet Union). My family was thus forced to dig up long-buried records and tell the awful investigator exactly when, where and how all my Polish ancestors had died, in order that the KGB couldn’t discover their names and impersonate them to “get at” me. This led to the upsetting discovery that some of my Polish forebears, captured as members of the Polish resistance, had died in Auschwitz.

I was obliged to attend several interviews with the investigator in a sparse office in an anonymous building near Parliament Square, furnished with sinister-looking steel filing cabinets. His desk, like that of an interrogator, was bare but for one government-issue swivel lamp, the only light in the otherwise gloomy room. Sometimes the interviews would last for hours. My family and friends, who were subjected to separate questionings, were at first amused by his questions, but soon became irritated and in some cases upset.

The planned start date of my work at the Foreign Office came and went and I had not passed my “PV,” as positive vetting is known. The personnel officer assigned to my case took some pleasure in telling me that it was extremely unlikely that I would eventually be allowed in. I considered withdrawing from the process and abandoning my application to join, but I decided instead to swallow these humiliations. Too badly I wanted to become that rarefied species, a diplomat.

In retrospect, this process was akin to a kind of “hazing” ritual, of the kind practiced in certain American colleges, the military or similar institutions. It was a form of ritual humiliation, where my sexual habits, personal finances and most intimate relations were probed and exposed. Once complete, not only was I permitted to join the elite club of those permitted to see state secrets; I felt that I had shared with them—through my investigator—something of me, something private and personal. This was more, much more than a regular induction into a job.

The inculcation went further when the new entrant to the diplomatic service entered training. Immediately, we were encouraged to undergo a subtle but crucial transformation: the “I” became “we.” In describing to us the arcane and fetishized practices of the foreign service (the use, for instance, of special paper for ministers and senior officials: green-colored paper called, perversely, “blue”), our instructors did not talk of how they saw things with the personal and individual “I.” Instead, they talked about how “we” saw the world. Telegrams, then the principal form of communication between the Foreign Office and British embassies worldwide (there are now “e-grams”), were written in the first person plural. The author did not describe his or her own view of politics in Iran; instead they described how “we” saw the prospects for engagement with the Islamic regime.

A young diplomat from the British High Commission[172] in Pretoria lectured the new entrants about how “we” thought sanctions on apartheid South Africa were a bad idea (these were the days of Margaret Thatcher’s policy of “constructive engagement” with the white minority regime). A diplomatic dispatch was presented to us as an example of how to write such pieces. In it, the ambassador wrote about how “we” had got Iran “wrong” and “we” needed a new approach. In a number of different ways, the new recruits were taught how “we” saw the world. What we were never taught, however, was why it was that “we” saw the world that way. This method was assumed, implied, never confessed but nonetheless supreme.

One training exercise involved a game revolving around a crisis in a fictional country, Boremeya, and what “we,” meaning Britain, should do about it. It was a good game, and fun. It lasted about a day and consisted of crisis meetings, submissions to ministers (“Make sure to use ‘blue’ paper!”) and difficult encounters with the Boremeyan foreign minister, played by one of our instructors. Throughout the game, the new entrants were told to consider what “we” wanted or needed in the situation. Within such exercises, and infused in all our training, was a clear, if only rarely explicit, assumption. As diplomats, “we” were the embodiment of the state, Britain. What we thought was right was thus implicitly right for Britain.

It is obvious to the reader that such a transformation from the individual to the group must imply a loss both of individual agency and of moral autonomy. Processes such as that I underwent to join the Foreign Office have parallels in military induction, including in more striking form, Reserve Police Battalion 101. But it was not obvious to me at the time. I still felt the same person. I still believed that I was autonomous and free to make my own choices, within certain limits that I freely accepted. I convinced myself that if faced with a morally unacceptable instruction, such as murdering Jews, I would have the courage to refuse. Little did I know that today’s moral choices rarely come so clearly signaled.

I had been in the foreign service some nine years by the time I was posted to the British mission to the United Nations in New York. By then I was deeply steeped in the culture and mind-habits of my institution. Many of my friends were in the Foreign Office. The “office,” as we called it, was a kind of brother-and-sisterhood: All over the world there were co-members with whom I shared a common language and experience. I had experienced with them excitement and boredom, from the corridors of the United Nations to the mountains of the Hindu Kush. I was with them as they wept at the frustrations of negotiations, and as gunfire crackled on the streets of Pristina. They have been at my side in Hebron and Dresden, Oslo and Islamabad. With them, I watched wars begin and end, wrote and argued international law, and shared the many joys and miseries of a life lived in the glamour of overseas embassies, of high-level meetings and the dinginess of Whitehall offices. It was not an ordinary job.

And my job in New York was not ordinary either. I was to be the head of the Middle East section at the British Mission to the UN. It was an exciting and challenging task. My responsibilities covered the Arab–Israel dispute, the 1988 Lockerbie bombing by Libyan agents, and the long-standing and unresolved injustice of Morocco’s occupation of the Western Sahara. But my primary responsibility was Iraq—ensuring its disarmament and containment after the 1990 war, and the sanctions agreed at the UN Security Council to effect these goals. For Britain at the UN in those days, there was no more important task, and it was my responsibility. In the early days of my posting, I was so excited by the prospect of my work that I would whoop with joy as water poured over me in my morning shower.

One central part of my job was to maintain the UN Security Council’s support of restrictive economic sanctions against Iraq. When first told of this task, I relished it. I had no question that the sanctions were justified. Their purpose was, after all, to punish and contain that most evil and lawless of dictators, Saddam Hussein. When briefed in London before my posting, however, the first doubts began to assert themselves. Sanctions on Iraq had been imposed, I naively thought, because Iraq had not disarmed itself of its infamous “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD), in this case defined as nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and ballistic missiles with a range of over 150 kilometers. This failure presented a clear case for the maintenance of sanctions. However, when I asked one of my briefing officers in London whether the UK believed Iraq maintained significant stocks of WMD, he looked a little sheepish. “Not really,” he replied. How, then, do we justify sanctions, I asked, trying to contain my astonishment. He replied, on the basis that Iraq had failed to answer multiple questions about the destruction of its earlier stocks. In summary, sanctions were in place because Iraq had not correctly answered questions.

By the end of 1997, when I joined the mission, British and American policy at the UN Security Council was under severe pressure. Iraq’s allies on the council, particularly France and Russia, were arguing for an easing of sanctions on the grounds that Iraq had complied fully with its obligations, following the Gulf War cease-fire, to disarm completely of its nuclear program, chemical and biological weapons and long-range missiles. The UN weapons inspectors were, however, clearly saying that this was not the case, and that there remained many unresolved issues about Iraq’s WMD. We, the U.S. and the UK, deployed these unresolved issues to argue support for sanctions—what had happened to all the missiles Iraq had imported? Why the discrepancy between chemical bombs produced and those verifiably destroyed? Et cetera, et cetera. Sanctions, we argued with great vigor, were necessary to force Iraq to disarm, fully and verifiably, as it had demonstrably not yet done. It was a tough diplomatic fight, not helped by the absence of hard evidence.

Though opponents of sanctions argued that they were unjustified and caused immense human suffering in Iraq, our counterarguments were plausible: Iraq had failed on many occasions to cooperate fully with the weapons inspectors, leaving important questions unanswered; Saddam Hussein obstructed the operation of the UN’s oil-for-food program, which was designed to lessen the humanitarian suffering.

It was my job to cull and collate the innumerable statistics, reports and testimonies in support of this latter version of the story and to deploy them in speeches and debates in the Security Council. On the other side of the table, the diplomats opposing sanctions—led by Russia and France—could cite myriad reports detailing the suffering under the sanctions regime and the inequities of the oil-for-food program.

It was, of course, a complex story that we managed to divide into two distinct and opposing narratives. The atmosphere between the delegations on the Security Council was aggressive and adversarial, as it remained until—and after—the 2003 invasion. Political divisions were allowed to degenerate into personal animosities. The council, its chambers and corridors became a diplomatic battle zone where the more we fought, the more we entrenched our positions into competing blacks and whites. Thus were we able to obscure the deeper truth.

Governments and their officials can compose convincing versions of the truth, filled with more or less verifiable facts, and yet be entirely wrong. I did not make up lies about Hussein’s smuggling or obstruction of the UN’s humanitarian program. The speeches I drafted for my ambassador to deliver to the Security Council and my telegrams back to London were composed of facts filtered from the stacks of reports and intelligence that daily hit my desk. As I read these reports, facts and judgments that contradicted “our” version of events would fade into nothingness. Facts that reinforced our narrative would stand out to me as if highlighted, to be later deployed by me, my ambassador and my ministers, like hand grenades in the diplomatic trench warfare. Details in otherwise complicated reports would be extracted to be telegraphed back to London, where they would be inserted into ministerial briefings or press articles. A complicated picture was reduced to a selection of facts that became factoids, such as the suggestion that Saddam Hussein imported huge quantities of whiskey or built a dozen palaces, validated by constant repetition: true, but not the whole truth.

In the end, it became clear even to us that comprehensive sanctions were counterproductive. They targeted the wrong group of people, and their effects undermined the necessary international support for the containment of the Saddam regime. This reality slowly percolated into our small policy-making group, and eventually led to a change in policy. As the century turned, the U.S. and initiated a shift in Security Council policy toward what became known as “smart sanctions”—whereby Iraq could import all civilian goods except those with potential military application: so-called dual-use goods. But by then, the damage had been done.

That damage has been more fully revealed since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. One assumption of those planning that war was that Iraq’s middle class would quickly recover from Saddam’s removal, and Iraq’s economy would rapidly thrive. That assumption quickly met the brute force of the reality that there was no longer an Iraqi middle class and no economy to speak of. Iraq’s non-oil economy had been more or less completely destroyed by the dozen years of sanctions that I, and others, had helped enforce. Anyone with the chance—mostly the educated and professional classes—had left. Within a year of the imposition of sanctions, Iraq’s GDP had dropped by about three-quarters of its 1990 value to approximately that of the 1940s. By 1996, one million children under five were malnourished. In a country that had been cholera free, by 1994 there were 1,344 cases per 100,000 people. Even after the oil-for-food program came into operation, water treatment plants lacked the proper spare parts and maintenance; there were extended power cuts. The population had no choice but to obtain water directly from contaminated rivers, resulting in turn in massive increases in water-borne diseases such as typhoid and cholera. Though the statistics are debated still, and data from Iraq during this period are unreliable, a recent and thorough academic history of the sanctions era concludes from a review of epidemiological studies that for the period from 1990 to 2003, there was an “excess mortality rate” of more than 500,000 for children under five. In other words, half a million children died.[112] Though Saddam Hussein doubtless had a hand too, I cannot avoid my own responsibility. This was my work; this is what I did.

I have no way to assuage the shame I feel when I contemplate this episode. I was aware of the reports of humanitarian suffering, but I did little about them. In discussion within my ministry, I may have occasionally argued for easing the effects of comprehensive sanctions. But if I did, I suspect that I argued the political grounds for such a shift—the loss of support for our policies—rather than the urgent moral and humanitarian arguments. In our ministry’s culture, it was often deemed “emotional” or “immature” to burden arguments with moral sentiment. Real diplomats were cold-eyed and hard-headed, immune to the arguments of liberal protesters, journalists and other softheads who did not understand how the “real world” worked.

For years afterwards, I wondered how this might have happened. Why did we permit this? Or, rather, the actual, direct but more uncomfortable question: Why did I do this? My colleagues and I were decent people, or so I preferred to think. Likewise, my ministers and officials who endorsed the policy and defended it in Parliament and before an increasingly critical press. It was this very decency that helped still my doubts, that persuaded me that we could not have been doing wrong. Later, in recounting this story, my former colleagues or friends would say, “You were doing what you were told,” implying thereby that I bore no guilt and, needless to say, that they bore none either.

And as in all institutions unscrutinized from outside, the hold of “groupthink” was a firm one upon our little group of policy makers—no more than half a dozen or so people in the British government, a few more in the U.S. We reassured one another that we were doing the right thing. Our arguments sounded all the better the more we rehearsed them to one another.

The comfortable succor of my institution, in this case the British Foreign Office, allowed me to ignore the dictates of my own conscience. My bosses and colleagues were to me as the white-coated instructor in the Milgram experiment. The man who knew better. The man who held authority. Paid and committed to my profession and its enveloping persona, I was more than happy to press the button.

But here the parallel with Milgram ends. Milgram was an experiment. No one was hurt. Nothing really happened except a point was proven. Sanctions on Iraq were, unfortunately, no experiment. Though the arguments we played out in stuffy rooms in the UN in New York often seemed abstract, the effects of sanctions on ordinary men, women and children were to them all too painful. In the end, the difference between what I did and the Milgram experiment was this: In Milgram, the victim being electrocuted was an actor. In my case, the screams of pain and anguish coming from the other side of the wall were real.

The “man in the white coat” problem, as the insight from Milgram’s experiment might be called, is not just a problem of diplomacy. It takes little imagination to see how, to varying degrees, it is a problem intrinsic to any system where people feel dissociated from the consequences of their actions—where they feel that someone else, not them, is really in control. Thus, the ultimate paradox of government, however well-meaning in intent, is revealed. The more government seeks to act to tackle particular problems, the less individuals are likely to feel responsible for them. Whatever is legal is thus rendered morally permissible. Evidence for this is all around us in the decaying standards of public behavior in many realms, from the shameless greed of Wall Street bankers, to the brutality and exploitation perpetuated in the anonymity of the World Wide Web, to the thuggish antics to be witnessed on public transportation.

The answer is obvious. Confront individuals with the consequences of their actions. Restore the moral understanding that each of us is responsible for the world as it is, and for each other. Take away the man in the white coat.