Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife

You might also want to read Nagl's book: "How to Eat Soup with a Knife." (who knows how that period/quotation thing works...) Anyways, he covers insurgencies fought unsuccessfully by Americans and successfully by the British, and why they succeeded and failed. Nagl doesn't come out and say the reasons are X, Y, Z. It's more here are important events A, B, C and here are important structural and cultural facts about the militaries that can help explain them. Another book to read is "A Savage War of Peace." It describes the Algerian insurgency during French rule. While Petraeus based his strategy in Iraq on the French's strategy, it is also relevant due to the strong similarity between what happened with the French populace and what is happening with our own.