More on insurgencies

I read:

Anthony James Joes’s Urban Guerrilla Warfare
The US Marine Corps’s Guerrilla and how to fight him
Carlos Marighella’s Manual of the Urban Guerrilla

The latter 2 books are from the 1960s and I read them as background. Joes is a counterinsurgency theorist who analyzes a wide range of urban insurgencies and comes to several interesting conclusions:

1. Urban insurgencies almost always fail militarily because they lack any safe areas and because they attack their enemy where it is strongest.

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The M-19 Palace of Justice Takeover in 1985: New Documents

The amazing National Security Archive strikes again, this time showing how the Colombian army is responsible for the deaths of 70 people when they raided Colombia’s Palace of Justice following the guerrilla group M-19’s takeover of it in 1985.

The most striking note in it, that accords with anecdotes I’ve heard from people who were around at the time and knew people who died, was the two contradictory cables that came from the US Embassy, spaced two days apart:

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