The new US ground commander picked by President Bush to direct the military “surge” into Iraq believes that the war can be won with a radical change of tactics: those used by the British in Malaya and Ulster.

Lieutenant-General David Petraeus, handed perhaps the toughest US military assignment since the Vietnam War — to stabilise Iraq and defeat its militias — is one of the Army’s premier intellectuals and a devoted student of counter-insurgency techniques used by the British and French during the last century.

General Petraeus, who has spent 2½ of the past 4 years in Iraq, has been one of the few officers advocating a troop surge into Baghdad. He believes that a new approach, based on soldiers living and patrolling amid the population and co-opting local leaders, can halt the slide into chaos.

Having co-authored the US military’s counter-insurgency manual, General Petraeus believes that only by combining military strength and sensitive interaction with locals can an insurgency be defeated. He has been influenced by a study of the British in Malaya during the 1950s by John Nagl, a Pentagon official.

Colonel Nagl compared Malaya to America’s failure in Vietnam, where the US Army approached the conflict as a conventional war. The British defeated the insurgency in Malaya, he writes, because of a “civil-military strategy based on intelligence derived from a supportive local population”.

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.

When General Petraeus and his “Screaming Eagles” left in spring 2004, Mosul was largely peaceful. But it later became violent, and General Petraeus is not without critics, who claim that his softly-softly tactics allowed insurgents to bide their time until he left.

Since 2005, General Petraeus, 54, has been teaching US commanders in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Essential viewing is Paul Greengrass’s 2002 film Bloody Sunday about the 1972 massacre in Londonderry, when British troops fired on civil rights marchers, killing 14. Two of the main messages General Petraeus draws from Britain’s Northern Ireland experience is how low-ranking soldiers, unaware of local cultural mores, can effect adversely the course of a war; and how intelligence on the ground is crucial.

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