Bush commutes Libby sentence

[Jester]

Right. The potential recruiting grounds for the communist insurgency was 3 million, the number of actual MNLA supporters, funders and sympathizers would have been far larger than the 8000 or so combatants killed or captured.

Estimates for the total number of active supporters goes to around 40,000, which seem to be mostly subsistence farmers squeaking out a life on the edge of the jungle. The number of "active supporters," of the British was overwhelmingly higher, as was their "potential recruiting grounds," not to mention their actual ability to carry out that recruiting. Again, the MNLA was vastly outnumbered, and only survived at all by hiding in the jungle. Malaysia was a different situation in about a dozen ways that make the Briggs Plan an unusable model for Iraq. Or anywhere else in the middle east.

Hey, I'm just looking for a solution other than, "Sorry, you failed, run away and hope they don't follow you home Yankee".

And I'm telling you this one won't work. Call the President if you find something that will. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that particular problem to be solved.

It wouldn't work to move them out of the country. I would look to expand some existing small communities, and improve them greatly over time. The important point is to depopulate the places of innocents where insurgency exists, and move the populations to better, safer places.

...

I would think the prospect of going to somewhere pleasant and peaceful for a while, rather than a squalid stinking slum to be attractive for some people.

If the US had a proven record of making anything more than their own camps "pleasant and peaceful" in the face of the insurgency, this would make more sense. But the US is far too resented, and nowhere near in control enough, for this to work. I don't think there are enough Iraqis left who support the US enough to go along with such a scheme to populate more than a handful of towns. Every batch of "innocent victims" would contain enough sleepers to make the plan unworkable. Your villages would go up in smoke almost the moment they were built, just like everything else the US has tried to build in Iraq. People would fear relocating to such an obvious target, and the most violent insurgents would, of course, make blowing up such places primary objectives.

Even if some version of this plan worked, by some miracle, it would still be frighteningly expensive, require massively increasing your troop deployment, and take years to complete. The will to even continue the war has evaporated in the US, let alone to ramp it up substantially.

-Jester