Addendum : Nationalism
A lot of people who support America's policy in Iraq argue that the U.S. is bringing to the occupied country a better regime and hope for the future (an argument which Edward Luttwak does not dispute at all), as opposed to the nationalist/religious insurgents who want to take the country back to its old, anachronistic ways.
But Luttwak is a pragmatist -- and knows his History.
And History offers a lot of conclusive examples to the opposite effect, and most notably the way the very term "guerilla" was first created. Luttwak, in the same article, pointedly makes note of it:
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The word "guerilla" acquired its present meaning from a ferocious insurgency against would-be liberators.
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On July 6, 1808, King Joseph of Spain, who was the brother of Emperor Napoleon and had been placed on the Spanish throne by French troops, presented a draft constitution that for the first time in Spain's history offered an independent judiciary, freedom of the press, and the abolition of the feudal privileges of the aristocracy and the Church.
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Ecclesiastical overlords still owned at the time thousands of towns and villages, throughout Spain, inhabited by some of Europe's most wretched tenants.
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Far from demanding the immediate implementation of the new constitution, however, the peasants obeyed the priests who summoned them to fight against the ungodly innovations of the foreign invader and occupier.
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