ABSTRACT
This chapter provides nine revised beliefs that fly in the face of long held but misconceived counterinsurgency truths. Misunderstandings; misinterpretations; misapplication of policies, failing to recognize past mistakes threaten to condemn future counterinsurgency operations to early setbacks and potential ultimate failure. Success in a counterinsurgency requires more than just military operations and overwhelming force will not be in a liberal democracy's counterinsurgency deck of cards, leastwise not at the operational and strategic levels of war. Building democracy has been at the heart of American counterinsurgency doctrine. United States forces support for the Sons of Iraq in the face of the national government's sectarianism demonstrated there were limits to American willingness to back Baghdad. Colonel Peter Mansoor, David Petraeus' executive officer in Baghdad, observed that his commander's efforts to steer Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki away from support of sectarian violence and other misuses of authority was never in public.
