re: #235 William Barnett-Lewis

2. The outside support you mention leads to another point, that being the importance for insurgents of having ‘sanctuary’ areas, either inside the target country or in one of its neighbors. if an insurgency is to succeed, it must eventually either create or acquire such ‘safe base’ areas. Without them, or if they are lost, then the insurgency becomes vulnerable, as examples see the crippling of FARC in Columbia in the late 1990s - early 2000s, and the destruction of the Tamil Tigers in 2006-2009.

This is a point on which the hopes of many militia groups in the US founder. There is no way for such groups to carve out a ‘no-go zone’ within the US, and neither Canada nor Mexico would be inclined to offer such groups such an area. Whatever may be said about the morality of the US involvements in Vietnam and Iraq, in both cases the only safe areas insurgents found were on the other side of national borders. The US military was able to get anywhere it needed to go with the nations it was operating in. The same would be true within the US, and any fantasies to the contrary are just that.