Here’s an interesting article on General Petraeus’ strategy for fighting the insurgents in Iraq. It is based on the British strategy in Malaya:

A key lesson General Petraeus draws from Vietnam, compared to Malaya, is that the US Army is historically unprepared to fight insurgencies. The American military has overwhelming force for conventional combat but, without the British experience of empire, is intellectually unequipped to deal with the subtleties of guerrilla war.

The British, with their colonial history, are far better at combining local diplomacy with military force, a model General Petraeus wants to emulate.

Under his command, US forces can be expected to take up positions in Baghdad neighbourhoods, instead of limiting themselves to raids from large, fortified bases. Units will set up street patrols and strive to involve local religious and political leaders in reconstruction and employment projects, heavily funded from Washington.

General Petraeus, Commander of the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq in 2003, is largely credited with being one of the only US officers who succeeded in bringing order to his region of Iraq by establishing a British colonial model of civil-military interaction.

In Mosul he entered an area with 110,000 former Iraqi Army soldiers and 20,000 Kurdish militiamen. But unlike the tactics in much of Iraq, General Petraeus took pride in conducting raids with minimum violence.

He introduced “cordon and knock”: Houses were surrounded, but not entered, and suspected insurgents were invited to turn themselves in. He allowed imams to inspect his jails and never blindfolded detainees.

He was obsessed by jump-starting the local economy and made sure that workers were paid on time. “The real goal is to create as many Iraqis as possible who feel they have a stake in the new Iraq,” he wrote soon after the invasion.

(via)
I think that economic incentives may work for some but there are others who are in this war for religious reasons and won’t be swayed by reconstruction money or a share in oil profits. I hope that he’s prepared to fight them and get rid of the al-Sadr influence before he tries to make nice with them.