This NYT story of a Baghdad mental hospital raised the same question raised by the 1967 film The King of Hearts, set in WWI, in which a Scottish soldier wanders into a a small French village populated only with the patients of the local mental hospital: Who are the real madmen?

One of the tragedies of the war -- a preventable tragedy in the view of many doctors and nurses -- occurred here. Iraq's only hospital providing long-term care for chronic schizophrenia and other serious disorders, Al Rashad was all but destroyed. When American marines clashed with Saddam Hussein's irregulars trying to block their advance into Baghdad, the marines came through the gates here and knocked down the walls with their tanks. . . . Waves of looters came in with them, staff members said.

One of the oldest health institutions in Iraq, Al Rashad has long been designated a civilian hospital. The director, Amir Abou Heelo, told the Marine commander on April 8 that he was entering a psychiatric facility, staff doctors said in interviews. But the protest did little good.

"I am disappointed," said Dr. Raghad Sursan, a psychiatrist. "I am mad, and if there is a word that is bigger than mad, I am that, because the marines were there and could have done something to stop it."

. . .

Of the more than 1,400 Iraqis institutionalized here at the beginning of the year, 300 remain. The staff has been able to cope only because the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross, having adopted this facility three years ago, raced emergency food and medical supplies here as Baghdad was falling.

The complaint of the Iraqi psychiatric staff is that the marines stood by as looters carried away every bed, basin, cooker, air-conditioner, piece of furniture or thing of value.

The marines broke the door down on the maximum security wing, and in no time the patients were gone, untethered from the antipsychotic drugs that stabilized many of them.

One doctor said he was told by a Marine officer that the officer was there to "liberate and then leave."