William Lind’s latest column, “The Boomerang Effect,” predicts an unpleasant and unexpected consequence of US military involvement in Iraq: the proliferation of terrorist and insurgent tactics to the US by returning soldiers.
Last week, one of my students, a Marine captain, asked whether I had heard a news report about an “IED-like device†supposedly found near Cincinnati, and if I thought we would soon start seeing IEDs here in the U.S. I replied that I had not heard the news story, but as to whether we would see IEDs here at home, the answer is yes.
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 [. . . ]
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.
I don’t agree with everything Lind says in this column. But I was intrigued enough to start thinking of historical evidence that this could happen, apart from the Afghanistan-USSR example which is cited.
The first assumption is that a minority of US soldiers will apply knowledge learned in their military career to terrorism, murder or organised crime. Now some leftists will argue that military service causes men to be desensitised to violence and to become psychopathic Rambo-style time bombs. But you don’t have to believe that to see examples of soldiers becoming terrorists – Washington sniper John Muhammad and Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh are names that spring to mind.
The second assumption is that fighting 4GW overseas can result in domestic violence and instability. In the US experience, Vietnam is the prime example of this. Within the military, there were riots, protests, sabotage, and “fraggings” – many were isolated incidents, but they show a larger trend. Domestically, many small armed groups formed, some with ex-military members. There were hundreds of bombings and several high-profile assassinations.  Not all of this was related to the war, but some of it was.
In Europe, “The Boomerang Effect” had the potential to topple governments. For example, the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Portugal followed public dissatisfaction against the colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. In France, there were massacres of Algerians in Paris, violence between rival Algerian groups in France, and multiple attempts by the military dissident group OAS to kill President Charles de Gaulle.
