David Killcullen is a military intellectual, an anthropologist, a retired officer in the Australian army and a former adviser on counter-insurgency to General Petraeus. This information may not commend him to you at all. But his argument, mostly about the revolt of tribal leadership against the sectarian terrorists in Iraq, is persuasive to me. His claims actually are moderate and measured.
Let me warn you: the paper -- from Small Wars Journal -- is not short. Well, it's not all that long either. But it is full of information, very little of which you get from the quotidian press. And even not from the quotidian press.