The Myth of the better war: faulty history lures Americans into foolish interventions.

• Author: Preble, Christopher
• Position: Wrong Turn: America's Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency - Book review

Wrong Turn: America's Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency, by Colonel Gian Gentile, The New Press, 208 pages, $24.9;

Army Col. Gian Gentile, a combat veteran and professor of history at West Point, begins his book on a personal note by acknowledging the sacrifices and hardships that his unit, the Eighth Squadron, Tenth Cavalry, encountered while conducting counterinsurgency operations in Iraq in 2006. Five members of the unit were killed in action. Many more were seriously wounded. They witnessed unconscionable brutality perpetrated against Iraqis by other Iraqis in the course of a horrific civil war. These scenes are so seared into their memory, he writes, "that one's joy for life would never be the same." It is immediately apparent what motivated Gentile to write Wrong Turn.

Gentile's object is equally clear: "to drive a stake through the heart of the notion that counterinsurgency has worked in the past and will therefore work in the future." Specifically, he challenges the widely accepted idea that America's counterinsurgency wars--in Vietnam, Iraq, and now Afghanistan--"were made better simply by enlightened generals and improved tactics."

This myth of the better war waged by better men has been used to rally the American people to support foreign interventions and re-interventions into situations that seemed lost. An exaggerated faith in counterinsurgency (COIN) will encourage similar misadventures in the future, he warns.

The "better war" narrative began with the 0 British campaign to crush a communist insurgency in Malaya (now Malaysia) from 1948 to 1960. Conventional wisdom holds that the British effort under the leadership of Lt. Gen. Harold Briggs was teetering on collapse in late 1951. In early 1952, the story continues, Gen. Gerald Templer arrived on the scene, and the situation immediately improved. Contemporary observers concluded that the apparent turnaround was driven by Templer's strategy of protecting the Malayan population and thus draining support away from the insurgents.

That narrative is largely incorrect. "The primary historical record," Gentile writes, "shows that there was no discontinuity" between Briggs and Templer. Both were committed to implementing the Briggs Plan: a massive and often brutal resettlement program that relocated hundreds of thousands of people suspected of sympathizing with the insurgents (chiefly members of the ethnic Chinese minority in Malaya).

In retrospect, ultimate British victory was...