[jjotto]

Not without a brutality that most Americans would not accept, and not without massive occupation and without installing a brutal puppet ruler.

The Council on Foreign Relations formula for counter-insurgency will never work.

The real question is how to stop the invasion of America by hostile foreigners?

[Wallace T.]

The United States did defeat several counterinsurgencies, but you must go back over a century: to the Philippines, when we defeated Muslim insurgents by methods that would not be countenanced today, and the Indian Wars within the United States, which finally ended with the Battle of Wounded Knee.

There are two ways to defeat enemies: brutality and utter suppression, as with the Indians and the Filipino Muslims, or establishing a new ruling group, as we did in West Germany and Japan by suppressing the militarist factions and empowering pro-Western groups. The United States will not engage in massacres of noncombatants, torture far surpassing waterboarding or sleep deprivation, and profanation of the Muslim religion that worked in the Philippines. But the Muslim nations of the Middle East do not have the level of education and history of civil society that West Germany or Japan had. At best, we may be able to bring in leaders like Assad, Saddam Hussein, or Qaddafi, secular Arab nationalist dictators who were brutal but at least opposed to radical Islam.