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"In 1780, a majority of Americans were disinclined to support George Washington's Army. Throughout the Revolutionary War, support for the Patriots went up and down, until the victory at Yorktown made the Bruts thrown their hand in. Until Sherman took Atlanta in Septemeber, 1864, public opinion in the north. was willing to make a deal with Jefferson Davis. There is no such thing as a popular war."

I should like to expand on this, because it is directly on the topic I have tried to address.

In the American War of Independence, the Americans were the guerillas. What would have been required for the British to win that war? Depopulation of whole areas in rebellion, killing many, many civilians. The British did win the Boer War, which was an insurgency, and they did it by putting all civilians in concentration camps and killing all civilians who resisted. Insurgencies are wars of populations against armies. The only way to win them is by killing large numbers of people.

In the American Civil War, there were organized armies in the field, but there was also an insurgent population in rebellion supporting them in every way. It was the Union general Sherman's march through Georgia, unleashing the US Army on American citizens, that broke the will of that portion of the South and ended rebellion there. It also intimidated the Carolinas, where Sherman was next headed, into submission, since the choice was to have the civilian population destroyed by the US Army, as had happened in Georgia.

In Algeria, France systematically defeated the FLN insurgents, and in the process inflicted between 100,000 and half a million civilian casualties. President De Gaulle examined well what was required to keep Algerie francaise, and concluded that what would have been required was akin to genocide, a perpetual war against the Arab civilians, driving them into the desert and systematically killing them. De Gaulle concluded that absent that, no victory was possible there. And since De Gaulle was unwilling to commit the French Republic to that course, he decided to withdraw. However, he did not withdraw on his own decision. He presented a referendum to the French people: withdraw from Algeria, or fight to the death. 75% of the French thought that maintaining French control of Algeria was not worth doing to France what would have had to be done to retain it. And so Algeria was let go free.

In the American West, the Americans learnt that the only way to defeat the Indians was to destroy their food supply by killing the buffalo, hound them into reservations, and kill all Indians, men, women or children, who went off the reservation. The Indian reservation was a concentration camp, and it ended successive Indian insurgencies.

In Israel, there is a perpetual insurgency which cannot be defeated. The Israelis have been unwilling to turn the Palestinian areas into concentration camps/Indian reservations and starve those areas still in rebellion into submission. And so the war there continues to percolate, and shall continue to do so.

The only way that insurgencies have ever been defeated in modern history is by concentration camps and unleashing armies on civilian populations. Nothing else has worked, and nothing else is at all likely to work.

This is why, faced with the prospect of an insurgency, a nation has to make a "gut check", to use the American military parlance. If you are NOT willing to resort to concentration camps and unleashing armies on civilians, then entering a war with an insurgency is destined to end in your defeat.

Would the tactics needed to win a war against an insurgency be popular? No. They are brutal. They constitute "crimes against humanity" under international war. The way the British won the Boer War and the Americans won the US Civil War and the Indian Wars all constituted crimes against humanity by present law. But that is how you defeat insurgencies. If you are not willing to commit crimes against humanity, you cannot win such a war and you should not enter into it. It is a matter of doing the "gut check" BEFORE plunging ahead.

As a matter of fact, the Americans in the Revolutionary war only occasionally were a guerrilla force. Washington victories at Trenton and Princeton, where he showed a tactical brilliance that belies his general military reputation, were such instances. Francis Marion's efforts against Cornwallis might even bear the terrorist label, which is why Mel Gibson did not use his name in "The Patriot." But by and large, it was Washington; ability to stand up a national army and keep it in existence that led to British failure. Had General Howe been willing aggressively to pursue Washington after the Americans were driven from New York City--as General Grant and others urged--probably the rebellion would have been broken and Congress would have been willing to accept whatever deal that Howe offered. With the the precedent in the Jacobite rebellion in mind, we probably would have got and accepted similar terms. IAC, then and afterward, the Brits came very close to winning the whole thing .

The comparison with the Boer War is more apt, but misleading. Unlike the British, we are NOT a colonizing power, nor is this our habit of mind. Our best --or worst--attempt was in the Philippines, and by 1936 we had decided to give it up entirely and go back to our original purpose, which was to obtain a naval base at Manila and to deny the islands to the Japanese by granting independence to the Filipinos. As for "crushing" the insurgency, that never happened. The Moros have been there forever.

As for Sherman in Georgia. It suggests that if Fourth Army had been able to come into Iraq from Turkey and take Fallujah by force, then an object lesson would have been made. Yes, Sherman's bummers were a lot more savage than Northern memory will admit, but their main effect was intimidation, although, so far as Carolina is concerned, the burning of Columbia, amounts to a lot more than intimidation.