Unlike Previous Counterinsurgencies

As the Baker/Hamilton club considers our options in the Middle East, its members would do well to study the classic works on counterinsurgency. The first comes from a French lieutenant colonel, David Galula, who was a commander in Algeria in the 1950s. He later studied in America and for a short time consulted to the RAND Corporation. His classic work, "Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice," has become required reading for the more thoughtful members of the military community.

Originally published in 1964, it has been reissued this year with a dandy introduction by an American Army lieutenant colonel, John Nagl, who also has written a fine book on the same subject, "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam." Galula formulated five basic laws for fighting insurgencies:

(1) The population is the basic target, and all other basic principles flow from this one. Whichever side wins over the population will win the war. "Destruction of the rebel forces and occupation of the geographic terrain led us nowhere so long as we did not control and get the support of the population," Galula wrote about the Algerian conflict in a 1963 RAND report, "Pacification in Algeria, 1956-1958," which was reissued this year.

(2) Support from the population can only be obtained through the efforts of the minority among the population that favors the counterinsurgent.

(3) This minority will emerge — and eventually become the majority — only if the counterinsurgent is seen as the ultimate victor. For us to win, the original minority will have to take risks, and it will only do that if we are known, respected, and seen to be winning. Above all, we must be able to protect them.

(4) The superiority of the counterinsurgent will almost never be so overwhelming that he can simply dominate the whole territory. The counterinsurgent has to concentrate his efforts area by area, and demonstrate staying power and resolve.

This is what we nowadays call the "inkblot strategy," or the "clear and hold" strategy. We have done well at "clearing," but all too often we have left the cleared areas, relying on Iraqis to hold them, instead of constantly maintaining small operational groups in and around the cleared areas and initiating combat with terrorists who try to move back in. When we fail to do that, the crucial "minority that favors the counterinsurgent" gets killed.

(5) At a certain point, the war itself becomes the central issue. The population's attitude is dictated not by the intrinsic merits of the contending causes, but by their conviction about winners and losers. Whoever is judged the likely winner will gain popular support, and most likely win the war. Being seen as the eventual winner eventually determines the winner, short of creating a military dictatorship that simply executes anyone on the other side.

It's pure Vince Lombardi: Winning is the only thing. You need popular support, and you'll only get it if two conditions are met: You must have good personal relationships with lots of people, and the people must think you're the winner. If they do, they'll help you win by taking you into their families and tribes, providing you with information, and helping you track down the insurgents. If they don't, they'll either avoid you or support the enemy. Karen Hughes, please take note. You need to convince the peoples of the Middle East that we are winners, not that we are lovable, gentle, and tolerant.

Galula's rules are excellent for dealing with the situation he faced in Algeria, which seems superficially to be a proper model for Iraq and Afghanistan. In both countries, our soldiers are successful when they operate as they should or when the terrorists make the mistake of attacking in force, which is literally suicidal. We could do better still if we had fewer soldiers sitting on mega-bases, in the military version of the Green Zone in Baghdad, long the symbol of the isolation and consequent ignorance of American personnel.

This war is not like the one Galula waged in at least two crucial respects: It is much bigger than a single country, and ideology is much more important in vital areas of the battlefield. The insurgents in Iraq do not just depend on the Iraqi people for support, because they have enormous support in Syria and Iran. While the Syrians and the Iranians are supporting an anti-American insurgency in Iraq, they face the real possibility of insurgencies in their own countries. Indeed, the Iranians have had to contend with a nonviolent insurgency for many years now.

That fact — ignored by all the analysts with whom I am familiar — changes things. It means that while we are counterinsurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq, we are potential insurgents in Syria and Iran. We should be fighting for popular support in at least four countries, where the people will be evaluating our likelihood of success across the entire battlefield, not just city-by-city or country-by-country. The peoples of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon — as well as those on the margins, who are not yet swept up in the war but may well be quite soon — are evaluating the battlefield very carefully, for they must be ready to jump on the winner's bandwagon.

Then there is "the ideology." Galula insists that ideology is important mainly in the creation of the insurgency, but loses significance when the people have to decide about winners and losers. He downplays the importance of the insurgents' ideology and at one point says that most any complaint will do (and there are always complaints), and that the insurgents can even change their ideology (as the Chinese communists did on several occasions).

I think that's wrong in the current war. The insurgents are mostly jihadis, who act in the name of a religious imperative. I think the imperative is central to who they are and why and how they kill. Even though there are secular Arab terrorists in Iraq, like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command, they are a tiny minority of the terror army.

This has worked against us in Iraq, where it is dangerous to be branded "an infidel" or a "crusader," but it can work to our advantage elsewhere, because there is a mass disgust with Islam in Iran, and the Assad family dictatorship in Syria is widely viewed as Islamically marginal. So if we supported democratic revolutions in Iran and Syria, we could expect considerable popular support, just based on ideological considerations. If the anti-Iranian and anti-Syrian insurgencies won, our counterinsurgency in Iraq would likely do much better as a result.

This war is unlike all previous counterinsurgencies, because the contending forces are on different sides of the insurgent/counterinsurgent divide, in different areas of the broad battlefield. Let's hope the wise men now considering our options get it right.

Mr. Ledeen is resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.