The thing about Malaysia is that the most of the rebels were ethnic Chinese, a small section of the populace that could be easily isolated from the majority Malay population (who by the way, were pro-British).

The Philipines? A joke. Bolo wielding tribesmen vs. rifle armed U.S soldiers.

You want a successful counterinsurgency? Try the early stages of the Afghan war, before we diverted resources away from the place. Try the Australians or Navy SEALs in Vietnam, try the Colombian government's operations again FARC, try the Boer War.

The thing is, counterinsurgency requires that you be ruthless, that you manipulate, torture and kill. Unfortunately, we don't have the balls for that... but we do have the balls to arrest our own citizens and hold them without charge on the basis of their beliefs or ethnic origins.

Here's a nice read about what we did right, and what we're now doing wrong. Iraq's CI (and America's CI) is being utterly mishandled IMO.

(http://www.exile.ru/2006-September-22/war_nerd.html)

This is what happens when we have people like Dick Cheney (soulless money grubber), or Donald Rumsfeld (borderline retard) in charge of our nation.