In a recent post, I noted a situation described by John Robb on his blog, Global Guerillas: Insurgents have successfully shut down oil industry operations in southern Iraq by sending threatening letters to industry employees. For the cost of some stamps, insurgents caused serious economic disruption in Iraq -- and serious harm, therefore, to the U.S. military's security and stabilization operations, or SASO.

Here's a new example of the same dynamic. Doctors and other professionals are fleeing Iraq because of, yes, anonymous threatening letters. Iraqis who can't get basic medical care will quite reasonably regard their country as unstable, and blame the occupying power. With a few stamps, insurgents have again seriously challenged the legitimacy of the American occupation.

The Washington Post reports:"Iraq's top professionals -- doctors, lawyers, professors -- and businessmen have been targeted by shadowy political groups for kidnapping and ransom, as well as murder, some of them say. So many have fled the country that Iraq is in danger of losing the core of skilled people it needs most just as it is trying to build a newly independent society."

How would a military occupation go about fighting this sort of trend with airstrikes and armored columns? And what are the other military options? How on earth does an occupying army reverse the flight of cardiologists and pediatricians?

Another example of why I think the war is going very, very badly because of the application of tools that have sharply limited utility for the job at hand.

More posts coming soon in the"Shadows and Fog" series. I've been semi-busy, semi-depressed about being trapped in the desert with nothing to do, and otherwise distracted.

Chris Bray - 1/26/2006

Thanks.

John Muir - 1/26/2006

As a disabled combat veteran of Vietnam and a former Sergeant (of Marines) I wish to complement Sgt. Bray on his thoughtful, insightful, and cogent comments on the war in Iraq. Sergeants are never asked to help write history, but they are frequently asked to make it. If there is any doubt in anyone's mind as to the ability of a lowly sergeant to understand and relate to the complex and complicated geo-political machinations of the war in Iraq let me ease your minds. Sgt. Bray has put his finger on the exact center of the problem, strikingly similar to the issues surrounding the Vietnam war, which is: how do we take a mighty military force into a third world country with the best of intentions and win all the battles only to lose the war? Simple, we are trying to swat flies with a sledge hammer. A thousand pound bomb, even if it kills the target we were after leaves a lot of extra damage behind. When we do that, which we seemingly always do, we create more insurgents than we kill. When we stomped through some farmers rice paddy to search and destroy the VC, we did the same thing. We created sympathy for the very people we were trying to destroy. Blowing up people's houses in order to get to one insurgent leader is not ever going to be acceptable to the person who's house has been destroyed.