Book excerpt: Images from Baghdads now notorious Abu Ghraib prison have come to define the ill-starred occupation of Iraq, but they also remind us of wars undiminished brutality and indiscriminate excess. Yet, what happened in Abu Ghraib took place, sometimes on a huge scale, during World War II and later in Kenya, Algeria, Vietnam, Bosnia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Chechnya, bearing witness to our capacity to act in barbarous ways if circumstances permit. With original contributions from world-class scholars, this book raises disturbing questions: Can warfare be anything other than barbaric? Are we all human, or are some of us less human than others in wartime? Can torture ever be justified? The Barbarisation of Warfare is a provocative and hard-hitting analysis of the human misery and complex moral dimensions of modern warfare.