Out of the blue, and right from the heart of the American military establishment — the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, 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 militarization 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, liberty 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.
We always vaguely knew that there must be link between what our forces were doing abroad and what was going on at home — did we not? But what Porch does so crisply in "Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War" is to underwrite Arendt's insight with scholarship that goes back two-and-a-half centuries, taking in numerous forgotten conflicts. For example, he shows how intelligence techniques, devised by the U.S. Army in the Philippines war, were used on U.S. unions and even suspected "reds" in Hollywood.
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