From Alternet’s How the U.S. Just Got Schooled by a ‘Rag-Tag’ Neighborhood Army in Iraq: “Guerrilla wars are slow, crock-pot wars. To win this kind of war, the long war, takes patience. Trying to force a ‘defining moment’ by military action is not just ignorant and idiotic, but risks further demoralizing your side when that moment doesn’t happen, as it inevitably won’t. What happens when you launch premature strikes on a neighborhood-based group like the Mahdi Army is that you just end up convincing their neighborhoods that the occupiers are the enemy, and the Mahdi boys — local guys you’ve known all your life — are heroes, defending your glorious slum from the foreigners and their lackeys.”