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I don't believe the statement that no insurgency was ever put down with conventional means. The Romans were very good at stomping insurgency.

Sure, counterinsurgencies can be stopped through pure force IF enough force is used. That is not going to happen in the modern world and certainly not in the Middle East. Neither side has the stomach for that.

Also, as a member of the Southeast Asian War Games (Second Place) I fully believe that the North VN's ability to make war was broken at Tet. We just let them negotiate too long after that. Had we taken the FULL battle North in 1969 VN would now be free.

The US never had an effective counterinsurgency policy in Vietnam and treated it as a conventional war. IMHO, that is why we lost. Taking North Vietnam wouldn't have guaranteed an end to the war. That would have required defeating the insurgents which is a much difficult task that just destroying tanks. Taking North Vietnam without defeating the will of the insurgents to fight would have simply made the war much more costly as is happening in Iraq.

On the other hand look at the British experience in Malaya where they were able to mount an effective campaign and put an end to the fighting. It is a perfect model for what we should be doing in Iraq.

How can you win hearts and minds and fight a war at the same time. Can you imagine if we had to destroy the Nazi war machine and have make the German people like us at the same time. Also after the Tet offensive the war turned mainly conventional. We we're fighting a regular NVA army not the viet cong which were decimated during Tet. A battle we won decisively but that newsreader Walter Croncite turned into a defeat.

The common problem in both VN and Iraq is the politicians are determining (and the lawyers) how the war is fought. Bush's speech last night was just plain limp and not convincing. We could easily STILL "win" in Iraq. I have a 60 day plan that would bring the country to complete peace and quite. It would even solve the Iran problem. If I started today all of our troops would be home well before the 4th of July.