Thanks for bringing that to the discussion, Maphu! It highlights one of the main COIN principles: one size does not fit all. You got through to those families on one level, but there was the other level that you couldn't get to. We've seen that in other involvements throughout our history, including the Indian Wars and Central America in the 1920s.

That said, hearts and minds can prove effective. I'm thinking here of the Montagnard example in Vietnam. Of course, there the 'Yards had a cause and purpose of their own, and we to an extent dovetailed with it (possibly in a similar way that we dovetailed with some Kurdish ambitions in Iraq). The culture of many 'Yard tribes was also conductive to this approach. SF teams could capitalize on their antipathy toward Vietnamese in general and then keep them pointed in the right direction when it came to targets. Of course, as the Montagnard Revolt demonstrated there are risks with this approach as well.

At the risk of over-generalizing, I'd say on the whole the possibilities in many areas of Iraq are closer to what we saw with the 'Yards than it was with the Vietnamese. In many areas in Vietnam the insurgency went back generations, as Maphu pointed out. Iraq has sectional feuds that go back at least that far, but we still have a chance (however slim) in some areas.