THE US army has turned years of conventional military thinking on its head in a new field manual for soldiers on counter-insurgency operations in Iraq.

The manual, the first for 20 years, emphasises that it is far more important to secure moral legitimacy and the support of the community than to kill insurgents and win battles.

It has been drawn up by General David Petraeus, who is known as one of America’s more culturally sensitive commanders. He led the 101st Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles, into Iraq and set up training for the Iraqi forces before returning to the US last year to head the army staff college at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

The manual’s conclusions are stark. “Lose moral legitimacy, lose the war,” it warns. In what could prove to be uncomfortable reading for Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, it emphasises that “efforts to build a legitimate government through illegitimate action — including unjustified or excessive use of force, unlawful detention, torture or punishment without trial — are self-defeating, even against insurgents who conceal themselves amid non-combatants”.

The 241-page report, to be published in September, has gone in “final draft” form to General Peter Schoomaker, the army chief of staff, for approval and was obtained by Secrecy News, an intelligence gathering website. A Fort Leavenworth spokesman said it was “not thrilled” the report had been leaked but was proud of its conclusions.

Petraeus’s thinking has been influenced by Nigel Aylwin-Foster, a British brigadier who caused a storm by writing in Military Review, an official army journal produced at Fort Leavenworth, that American officers displayed “cultural insensitivity” in Iraq that bordered on “institutional racism”.

Yet in the light of the Abu Ghraib scandal, an apparent massacre by marines at Haditha and the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl and her family, Petraeus’s conclusions are unlikely to be dismissed.

The report is co-signed by James Mattis, a lieutenant-general with the marines who provoked outrage last year for saying it was “a hell of a lot of fun” to shoot Afghans who “slapped women around”.

The rethinking has been going on at Leavenworth’s “lessons learnt” centre, where long-forgotten doctrines have been revived. “We threw away all our lessons after Vietnam because it was a war we didn’t want to remember,” said an army lecturer.

The field manual warns that “the more force is used, the less effective it is” and says the “best weapon is do not shoot”. It points out that “sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction” to provocation by insurgents.

Under the heading Unsuccessful Practices, it lists placing “priority on killing and capturing the enemy, not on engaging the population” and concentrating forces in large bases for protection rather than risking American casualties. It claims that “amnesty and rehabilitation” are tried and tested methods of winning over insurgents.

A US officer involved in compiling the manual said it represented much more than just a new doctrine. “It is the big idea,” he said. America is expected to face counter-insurgency wars in future rather than straightforward combat. “The idea is that you end the day with fewer enemies than when you started,” the officer said.

That has not been the experience of Iraq, where those who greeted the Americans as liberators have become terrified by the collapse of security.

Andrew Krepinevich, of the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defence think tank, said it was essential for the government to secure Baghdad: “There’s a saying in counter-insurgency warfare: if the government can’t protect itself, how can it protect you?”

KIDNAPPING

Gunmen in police uniforms yesterday abducted the head of the Iraqi Olympic committee and up to 30 other top sports officials and staff.

The kidnapped men were attending a meeting in a neighbourhood of central Baghdad when up to 50 gunmen arrived in government vehicles. One guard was shot and his body dumped nearby.

Among those seized were Olympic committee chief Ahmed al-Hadjiya.

Sports figures have become targets for kidnappings and ransom demands and some have also attracted the wrath of religious extremists. Two Iraqi Davis Cup tennis players and their coach were shot and killed in May, reportedly for offending Islamic fundamentalists by wearing shorts.

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