New Targets? Posted by Michael Signer

The insurgents in Iraq -- those irrational, crazed, evil lunatics -- have gone after police and military targets in a disconcertingly methodical manner. 

Now they've got another sickening, but instructive, target:  hospitals.  CNN reports:

A doctor and head of a Baghdad hospital was shot dead Thursday inside his clinic in the Abu Ghraib district of western Baghdad, said an Iraqi police official with Baghdad emergency police. Four gunmen stormed Dr. Kadhim Abbood Alwash's clinic and shot him to death, said Qassim Allawi, a Health Ministry official. Alwash was head of Karama General Hospital in Baghdad.

Why are they targeting people who run hospitals?  Aside from some unfathomable hatred of doctors?  My guess is they want to further weaken the civil society institutions that allow the country to function while in the face of an insurgency. 

By kneecapping these basic social building blocks, the insurgents link the occupation with chaos, in the Iraqi mind.  And by making society dysfunctional, they create a weird reverse incentive for American withdrawal -- hospitals will run again, imagine that!

I'd be curious about other thoughts on this.

Comments

[J Thomas]

US forces stop by hospitals and take anybody they think is an insurgent. If you're an insurgent looking for medical care (or you look like an insurgent -- military age male with a wound that might have come from a US weapon), you need a doctor who'll hide you. otherwise the marines are likely to carry you off and tell you they'll get you medical treatment after your interrogation is over.

If it's reached the point that 50% to 90% of the MDs do hide wounded insurgents, then it would be logical to start attacking the others.

If they do it when 10% of the doctors collaborate, then the 90% feel like it's like being struck by lightning, it can happen to anybody and the insurgents are evil and need to be eradicated.

If they do it when 10% of the doctors don't hide them, then the 10% feel like targets, it doesn't happen to just anybody, it's going to happen to them. Then give the holdout doctors a chance to switch sides and it could easily go to 99%.

[Andy]

Attacks targeting doctors aren't new, though they have been on the upswing lately.

Most Important Reasons for Attacking Doctors

First of all, criminal gangs, which flourish because of poor security, are targeting doctors for the same reason they are targeted all over the world. They earn lots of money, don't have bodyguards or entourages like politicians or businessmen and kidnapping them will get the criminals money.

Second, insurgents attack them because killing them will disable the medical system and cause chaos, which appears to be the primary goal of the insurgency at this point.

This second point is the point of the post, so I think Mr. Signer is right. But criminal kidnapping is still the primary reason doctors are attacked.

Other Reasons

Insurgents have been attacking medical staff because they are part of the secular intelligentsia.

A large number of doctors also fled the country and their successful return would be a sign of success for the new Iraq.

Because many doctors have trained and lived in the West, they have influences that Sunni terrorists consider abhorrent - science, secularism, etc.

Why Now?

The uptick in attacks on them may reflect an overall upsurge of violence. But it may also reflect better security protection of important targets in major cities and the insurgents' decision to go for easy targets they can get in cooperation with criminals.

[praktike]

It's actually possible that this guy was a Sunni killed by a group like the Badr Brigades.

[Dale]

What should happen to a doctor who is treating insurgents and the authorities hear about it?
And why does anyone think this doctor was killed by insurgents?
Are there no more criminals in the world? Is everyone either pro-American or a terrorist and no other reason for killing exists?
I am confused that everybody knows the reasons why something happened and what the culprit's ethnicity is without the culprits ever being caught. How come people "know" these things without evidence?
Does it all just fit our pre-conceived notions and we build the rationalization around it?

[J Thomas]

Dale, yes. He asked for thoughts and got them.

It makes sense for gangsters to kidnap doctors for ransom and usually return them if enough money is paid. It doesn't make as much sense to just kill them -- unless the gangsters have gotten to the point that doctors pay protection money to *not* be kidnapped, and then the holdouts might get killed on the spot.

It makes sense for insurgents who're mostly taking over at the grassroots level to kill doctors who don't treat them and hide them.

It makes sense for the iraqi secret police to kill doctors who *do* treat and hide insurgents.

It would make sense for israeli agents to kill anybody at all when it helps increase the chaos. Likud is better off with chaos in iraq than they would be with any other result. Any capable iraqi army could be a threat to israel. Chaos in iraq is no threat to israel.

All these are logical approaches, more than the original hypothesis that insurgents are irrational, and perhaps more than the second hypothesis that insurgents are doing so badly that they think they benefit by randomly killing doctors to create chaos in the places they should be organising.

[bob mcmanus]

The Leninist Strategy

Blog:Arms and Influence. I found the article, and the series it was part of, useful and interesting.

[Mike Signer]

Bob McManus's link is extremely useful and insightful, I found. The article divides insurgents into categories, like terrorists v. guerrillas. I thought the following passage was very helpful:

"The terrorist theorists believe attacks on the most innocent will trigger a chain of events that will lead more quickly and effectively to victory than scrupulously limiting the target list to representatives of the enemy government. Urban guerrillas, by and large, have rejected these methods as morally repugnant, or just practically counter-productive."

I find the insurgents' actions as morally repugnant as the next American -- but I'm interested in resolving the situation over there, and to do that I think have to swallow our gorge and approach these enemies as rational actors -- they want something and are trying to get it, and so to defeat them we have to understand their actions as tactics -- not just as incomprehensible, ad hoc eruptions of evil.

[Dan Kervick]

I'd be curious about other thoughts on this.

My other thought is that, based on the news report alone, it is impossible to tell who committed the murder of Dr. Alwash. Nor can we discern the motive for the murder. It is fun to make up scenarios to fill in the vast spaces of our ignorance, and to rail against some of the usual suspects, but these entertaining games don't advance our understanding.

[Robert M]

It is very logical and it works. It deprives civil society of the forces, institutions and characters that make a modern society work. the tactic plays to the American electorate directly because it makes them question the invasion of Iraq.

This occurs because the electorate expected that after applying the dictum that war is a continuation of politics by other means. By applying other means the American electorate desired and supported the invasion because it meant an end to war(4G and all other variations). This end was to occur in the USA as well as in Iraq. This has not happened in Iraq.

When the electorate sees a nation, without much knowledge of the nuances of Iraq, tolerate attacks by what they believe is outsiders(the Jihadists) without fighting back, they question the invasion and its costs. When they question the leadership of this country to get answers and see only the blame game from the people in charge it weakens support for the GWOT. So no matter how much real progress is taking place in most of the provinces of Iraq, the elctorate does not care. They want an end so blowing up hospitals is an effective demoralizer for our electorate.

[Dan Kervick]

Robert,

You may be correct about the motivation for the killing of Doctor Alwash, but you must admit you don't really know.

Perhaps the poor doctor just fell behind in his protection payments; or perhaps he scammed someone in the black market for medical supplies and body parts; or perhaps he was an informant of some kind who was double-crossed; or perhaps whatever group killed him had warned him not to treat members of some enemy group. But since there are all sorts of groups and all sorts of enemies in Iraq, even the last possibility doesn't tell us much. We just don't know.

I think we Americans should be wary of succumbing to a self-centered and somewhat paranoid attitude that sees everything that happens in Iraq as directly about us, and every episode of notable violence as a message for us. Surely not every act of violence in broken, contemporary Iraq is a carefully plotted political message designed to influence a faraway American public. Not every hood, killer, rebel, racketeer, outlaw, vengeance-seeker and fanatic in Iraq acts with that level of sophistication. There must be thousands of vendettas, agendas and power conflicts that are pursued independently of concerns with the US occupation.

And for all we know, the people who killed the doctor were some of "our guys".

[coal_train]

Oddly enough, the American troops also target Iraqi hospitals in their sweeps against insurgents, using the argument that the hospitals are treating wounded insurgents. Go figure.

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