Ok, I need to read Mike's post in detail before I reply to it. For Carl:

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners.

46% of those are African American.


Carl you counter actually makes my point. As I study the history of insurgency, rarely does the counterinsurgent recognize the perceptions of the insurgent, but rather relys on his own legality and upon the facts he uses to rationalize his actions.

Law and facts just don't matter much in COIN. Justice and perceptions are everything. The persective that matters on both of those is that of the insurgent segment of the populace.