Domestic Lessons Learned From Foreign Wars -- Henry Porter, The Observer/The Guardian
A new book reveals that intelligence tactics devised for use abroad are employed against America's own citizens
Out of the blue, and right from the heart of the American military establishment – the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey, California, no less – comes a coup of analysis that has a really important message for the British and American public. It is that the counterinsurgency wars of the past decade have not only been a bloody failure, but that the tactics, methods and hardware of these wars have inevitably ended up being used against the public at home. Think of mass surveillance, of drones, secret courts, the militarisation of the police, detention without trial.
Hannah Arendt identified "the boomerang effect of imperialism on the homeland" in The Origins of Totalitarianism, but the academic Douglas Porch has used the history of Britain, France and America to demonstrate that all the rhetoric about bringing, respectively, Britishness, liberté and freedom and democracy to the "little brown people who have no lights" is so much nonsense and that these brutal adventures almost never work and degrade the democracies that spawned them in the first place.
Read more ....
My Comment: There are a few errors in this Guardian report (Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus are not five star generals) and his political bias is evident (neoconservative historians and commentators such as Niall Ferguson and Robert Kaplan) .... there are some valid points on COIN being raised and I concur that they should be discussed in a more public forum.
