WHAT do American soldiers in Iraq, Israelis in Palestine, Russians in Chechnya have in common? We could also ask the same question about Americans during the Vietnam war, Pakistanis during the East Pakistan civil war and Serbs in Bosnia a decade ago.

In each case, soldiers went into battle convinced that they were fighting an enemy who was not only inferior to them, but also represented a threat to their countries. Hatred and fear drive otherwise decent human beings to commit butchery on a scale they would be incapable of in their normal setting.

How do ordinary people reach such a state of bestiality? Their indoctrination starts long before they enter military academies and training camps. Subtly and incessantly, the media as well as school textbooks drum in the message that their country, their civilisation and their particular faith are superior to all others.

More importantly, the establishment keeps its population in ignorance about a potential adversary. Travel is made difficult, and the import of newspapers, books and magazines from the opposing country is restricted. News in the home media is heavily slanted in order to distort reality. The perception of threat is magnified, and the common elements blurred over.

Against this backdrop, hatred is easy to generate. The ‘other’ is shown as somehow less than human. Pejorative names are routinely applied: thus, ‘gooks’, ‘ragheads’, ‘sand niggers’, and ‘bingos’ become part of everyday vocabulary. Even when a soldier kills an innocent civilian in enemy territory, this act is somehow not a crime because after all, one ‘haji’ looks like another.

This de-humanising of the adversary goes a long way to explaining horrors like Abu Ghraib, Haditha and Mai Lai. If you torture or slaughter mere ‘ragheads’, what’s the big deal? When Pakistani officers boasted their army would ‘improve the race’ through rape when fighting against the Mukti Bahini in East Pakistan in 1971, they were expressing their contempt for the enemy.

From hatred to violence is a very short step. In Russia today, violence against non-Europeans and non-Slavs is common. This racism is widespread and goes largely unpunished. In America after 9/11, anybody who appeared like a Muslim was fair game for rednecks. These attitudes and prejudices are shaped by culture and history, and are given currency by the reactionary media as well as by a populist establishment seeking to gain support from the lowest common denominator. TV channels like Fox News whip up the crudest form of patriotism to gain market share, and politicians use the flag shamelessly to garner votes.

So when instructors receive raw young recruits in military training establishments, half their work is already done. All that remains is to erase a soldier’s individuality, and instil instant, unquestioning obedience into him. This is done through systematic and savage bullying, made innocuous by harmless-seeming terms such as ‘hazing’ or ‘ragging’.

When a young man of 20 is sent to do battle in a faraway land, he has a lifetime of indoctrination behind him. He truly believes he has right on his side, and that God will watch over him. He has also been totally convinced that he is fighting to protect his country and his family, never mind that they are thousands of miles away.

The point of military instruction, apart from imparting weapons training and so forth, is to alter the moral framework of the individual soldier. In this new world he has entered, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ lose all meaning. To carry out his superior’s orders immediately and without question is ‘right’, and to question them or refuse to carry them out is ‘wrong’, and immediately and severely punishable.

In this unambiguous world, the greatest sin is to let the regiment down. When an officer says, “Jump!”, you don’t ask “Why?”. You jump as high as you can. Clearly, without this kind of mindless discipline, soldiers would not charge a machine gun position over open ground. Or sit in a trench as artillery shells explode around them.

But the downside of this behaviour is that it makes a soldier suspend his sense of morality, and his grasp of right and wrong. This training works in a clearly defined battlefield where the enemy is wearing a different uniform and fighting under a different flag. The problem arises when the foe is elusive and usually dressed as a civilian.

In such a theatre, everybody not wearing a uniform like yours is a potential enemy. A woman in a burqa could conceal a weapon, and a young boy could be carrying ammunition for a militant. All men are, of course, immediately suspect. On patrol, with a heightened sense of danger and with adrenaline coursing through the system, the first instinct is to shoot first at any sign of possible danger. ‘Better safe than sorry’ becomes the battlefield maxim.

So when we read that American soldiers recently shot a pregnant Iraqi woman dead as she was being rushed to a nearby hospital, we can guess at what went through their minds as they manned a checkpoint. On average, seven Iraqi civilians are killed in similar incidents every week.

In the context of demonising the enemy, atrocities become the norm, not aberrations. For generals, fighting against irregular forces that fade away into the population poses a major dilemma. Maintaining discipline while being aggressive at the same time is a huge problem. This is especially true for countries where policy is often shaped through a democratic process. It seems increasingly likely that Americans, fed up of Bush’s conduct of the war in Iraq, will punish the Republicans at the mid-term congressional elections in November.

More and more, warfare will be an asymmetrical affair, conducted between regular armies and irregular forces. Soldiers trained to shoot clearly identifiable enemies are ill-equipped to fight the shadow war that is the ‘war on terror’.

But as a generation of Vietnam veterans learned after they returned home, you do not just walk away after burying the dead. For many, committing nameless horrors because you are ordered to leaves deep psychological scars that you carry your whole life.

The ultimate axis of evil is the one between ignorance, fear, hatred and violence.