Newsweek leads us into the new week discussing brains and counterinsurgency strategy:

Sept. 17, 2007  issue – Dripping with sweat in the Baghdad summer heat, surrounded by armed Sunnis who not long ago might gladly have killed him, Gen. David Petraeus smiled. He listened as a former insurgent leader, a onetime member of Saddam Hussein’s security forces, listed the grievances that brought him over to the Americans’ side against the jihadists—the senseless killings of garbagemen and shopkeepers, the booby-trapped corpses in the streets, the indiscriminate IED attacks. When the man finished, Petraeus invited him to air his complaints publicly; minutes later the ex-insurgent was being interviewed on an Arabic satellite channel, and the top U.S. officer in Iraq strode off through the dust while his entourage scrambled to keep up. “Now this is counterinsurgency, by God!” he later declared.

Is it? Petraeus should know, as the man who pulled together The Book on it: the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (FM 4-23). There’s just one problem—Iraq doesn’t follow the book. The manual—highly touted as the basis upon which the surge of U.S. forces this year would be organized—deals with threats to a functioning government that enjoys broad-based legitimacy. That’s scarcely what exists in Baghdad, says Sarah Sewall, director of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights. A devout believer in winning hearts and minds, she worked closely with Petraeus on producing FM 4-23. “I would argue that Petraeus has done as good a job as humanly possible,” she says. “But by the time he got to Iraq, I think the war was no longer fightable ac-cording (sic) to the counterinsurgency doctrine we drafted.”

At this point I stopped reading the Newsweek analysis.  Not that I refuse to listen to yet another analysis on the complexity of Iraq and how we were unprepared for it.  I have written myself too many times on this same subject.  Also, I agree with Petraeus that given the option of having someone shoot a camera or a firearm at another person, I’d prefer the camera any day.  But I have been critical of other aspects of the new counterinsurgency field manual.  For instance, I have advocated a return to the wisdom of the Small Wars Manual concerning disarming the population, wisdom we implemented with vigor with the Sunnis (allowing them to keep only a single firearm for family protection but not to form militias except under U.S. supervision), but refused to implement with the Badr Corps, Jaish al Mahdi and other armed factions in the balance of Iraq, even though they are armed, supported, trained, funded, equipped and encouraged by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (Quds).  There are more examples I could cite on which I have opined, but will spare the reader.

I stopped reading the Newsweek analysis because, well, I guess I’m just old-fashioned.  If you are going to critique or report on something as an objective analyst, you had better get the name of the thing you’re going to critique right.  After twice seeing the designator for the field manual as FM 4-23 rather than FM 3-24, I figured that they didn’t have much to teach me.