I have just started reading Thomas E. Ricks’ latest book, The Gamble, General David Petraeus and The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008.

He starts off with the incident in Haditha, Iraq in the fall of 2005.  By the time I got to page 8, I came to realize how wrong the Cheney philosophy is about how to fight and win a war of this sort.

Here is something from page 6.

The American tradition also tends to neglect the lesson, learned repeatedly in dozens of twentieth-century wars, that the way to defeat an insurgency campaign is not to attack the enemy but instead to protect and win over the people. “The more you focus on the enemy, the harder it is to actually get anything done with the population,” noted Australian counterinsurgency theorist David Kilcullen who would play a prominent role in fixing the way the American military fought in Iraq. The best insurgent is not a dead one, who might leave behind a relative seeking vengeance, but one who is ignored by the population and perhaps is contemplating changing sides, bringing with him invaluable information.

I wonder if some of this knowledge is slipping away from us in Iraq, and more so in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  Most of the people in those countries seem to think so very little of the Taliban, that you would think it would be difficult for us to alienate them from our side.  Nevertheless, we seem to be successful at doing just that even with Obama in the White House.

If the people of this country understood what Ricks is saying, they would boo Cheney off the public stage as soon as he opened his mouth.