Understanding the Situation

The U.S. Army is now looking at Missouri during the Civil War to train platoon commanders for fighting the insurgents in Iraq. However, another American experience may be equally appropriate to the insurgency. Furthermore, from the insurgents' point of view, the war is a resistance war, a war of liberation against an occupying invader. To understand them, and to understand what their weaknesses are, it's probably worthwhile studying some of the resistance campaigns during World War II, especially in Yugoslavia and Greece, where two opposing ideologies found themselves fighting a common enemy, in the way Islamists work with secular Ba'athists in Iraq today.