Violence (1): Boomerang

This is a sobering column by William Lind, Boomerang Effect www.Military.com 12/06/06, anticipating one of the possible domestic results - he seems to think a very probable one - of the Iraq War:

One of the things U.S. troops are learning in Iraq is how people with little training and few resources can fight a state. Most American troops will see this within the framework of counterinsurgency. But a minority will apply their new-found knowledge in a very different way. After they return to the U.S. and leave the military, they will take what they learned in Iraq back to the inner cities, to the ethnic groups, gangs, and other alternate loyalties they left when they joined the service. There, they will put their new knowledge to work, in wars with each other and wars against the American state. It will not be long before we see police squad cars getting hit with IEDs and other techniques employed by Iraqi insurgents, right here in the streets of American cities.

I know this thought - not to speak of the reality when it happens - will be shocking to some readers. To anyone who really understands Fourth Generation war, it should not be. Fourth Generation war does not merely work on the will of a state’s political leaders, as some theorists have said. It does something far more powerful. It pulls an opposing state apart at the moral level.

Not a cheery thought. In many ways, the average American has been insulated from obvious effects of the Iraq War. But there will be plenty of repercussions.