Today is the anniversary of George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware in 1776, and an appropriate date to reflect on the nature of the Iraqi insurgency. The resistance in Iraq today is not much different than that from our own history.

Armies of the 18th Century usually took a winter break, but Washington’s use of guerilla tactics allowed the Colonists to take Trenton. Other guerilla tactics, employed by hit-and-run fighters like Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox,” also served to weaken British resolve. Improvised weapons were also common. Marion’s sabers and muskets, for example, were created by local blacksmiths. Terrorism was used to frighten those who might be tempted to aid the British. Collaborators were murdered, tortured, or their homes were torched. After the war, collaborators were purged from their positions and many sought refuge in Canada, Britain, or the West Indies. Alliances with “foreigners” who supplied the Colonists with cash, and military experts such as the Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben who provided expertise in military tactics, created a better-funded and better-disciplined resistance.

The War of Independence ended up involving 175,000 of the approximately 400,000 men in the Colonies. Most civilians felt the sting of war, from either the loss of a family member, a home destroyed, looted, commandeered, by being shot at or harmed, or having to flee as the British invaded. The longer the British occupation dragged on, the smaller the Loyalist support.

In the end, a British force of mainly conscripts who no longer understood the sense of dying in a foreign land lost to a weaker military they had defeated in a majority of the war’s battles. But the sheer size of the occupied land made the continuing occupation impossible, and the costs of the occupation could no longer be justified.

From the British loss in India, to the American loss in Vietnam and Russia’s loss in Afghanistan, from the lessons of the Roman empire and Alexander the Great, this seems to be a lesson that has to be learned over and over: that no foreign country can occupy even the weakest country for long.

This was published in the Standard Times on December 29, 2004
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20041229/opinion/312299932