Defining Insanity, Again.

 “Insanity,” Albert Einstein is supposed to have remarked, “is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” It is difficult to understand what Israel hoped to achieve by assassinating Hamas deputy political leader Saleh al-Arouri in Beirut on January 2, or the U.S. by killing Iraqi Shia militia leader Mushtaq Taleb al-Saidi in the heart of Baghdad on January 4. But if the assassins expected the murders to diminish the power of Hamas, or deter attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria they clearly qualify as lunatics.

Addicted to Murder

Israel has long been addicted to assassination. In his 2018 book “Rise and Kill First” Israeli investigative journalist Ronen Bergman revealed a total of more than 2,700 individuals shot, poisoned, blown up or otherwise terminated since the founding of the state. The eagerness to murder, as opposed to alternate options such as diplomacy or compromise, appears compulsive, often eliciting unpleasant consequences for Israel. In 1992, for example, the Israelis identified the nascent Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah as a potential threat and accordingly murdered the group’s leader Abbas al-Musawi, along with his wife and five year-old son. But the leader who replaced him, Hassan Nasrallah, turned out to be a far more effective opponent, molding Hezbollah into a potent military force that eventually drove the Israelis out of Lebanon altogether. Israel targeted Hamas leaders for years, but as journalist Helena Cobham observes, “over the decades Hamas has developed (a) a resilient and notably collegial leadership that is not destroyed by the killing of one or even half a dozen individuals, and (b) a very effective leadership-training process that means that for any one leader killed there are a dozen with the capacity to take over.” The effectiveness of this process was clearly demonstrated in Hamas’ intricately planned and devastating assault on October 7.

It Loses Us Wars, So We Do It Again

There being no strategy so ill-conceived that America will not adopt it, so it should come as no surprise that we have pursued assassination under a variety of euphemisms over the course of multiple lost wars. The Phoenix program in Vietnam, crafted with the help of supposedly sophisticated computer programs, killed some 20,000 people without affecting the course of the war or postponing America’s ultimate defeat. Nevertheless, it has been the principal tool deployed in the 21st century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, generating entirely predictable results.

Assassination Kills More Americans.

The Iraqi experience was unique in one respect; it produced the only data-driven analysis of the precise effects of what was in that conflict referred to as the “HVI” (High Value Individuals) Strategy. As I detailed in my book Kill Chain: The Rise of the High Tech Assassins, in 2007 a small but potent Baghdad-based intelligence cell attached to the senior U.S. Army commander in Iraq, Ray Odierno, took 200 cases over a five month period where the occupation forces has killed local insurgent leaders and looked to see what had happened then. In every case attacks on American troops immediately went up. Within three kilometers of the target’s base of operation, attacks in the thirty days after the killing increased by forty percent. Within a radius of five kilometers, they were still up by twenty percent. The dead leader was usually replaced in twenty four hours - always within forty-eight. The new leader was almost invariably bolder, more aggressive, eager for revenge and to prove himself. Targeting enemy leadership, it was clear, resulted in more dead Americans. In a briefing for Odierno, the analyst responsible for the study, Rex Rivolo, put up a slide highlighting an inescapable conclusion: “HVI strategy, our principal strategy in Iraq, is counterproductive and needs to be re-evaluated.”

Eager for Martyrdom

The strategy was not re-evaluated, but applied with furious intensity in the parallel Afghan war, where potential victims were tabulated in a “Joint Priorities Effects List'' and eliminated by the score, often in night raids by death squads with little appreciable effect apart from boosting Taliban bitterness and resolve. “We want to die anyway,” a local Taliban commander, recently promoted following the deaths of two predecessors, declared in 2011. “So those destined for martyrdom will die in the raids and the rest will continue to fight without fear.”

So what impels the homicidal compulsion of the drone-masters and night-raiders? Fundamentally, it reveals a mechanistic approach to conflict, a belief that an enemy system can be discommoded by disabling or removing a supposedly vital component. The same concept has powered the misbegotten strategic bombing campaigns of America’s wars, in which targeteers have identified and destroyed “critical nodes” in the enemy system only to have the enemy adapt and fight on. Perhaps this is inevitable; to act otherwise would require seeing the enemy not as a machine, but as human.