One man's noble freedom fighter is another man's hated guerrilla.

The balkans, mid to late '90s. A young LT was over there (I was his best man...twice, and he mine) and we were corresponding. He told us the noble Kosovo liberation fighters were engaging in drugs and prostitution and whatever to fund their operations.

Red Dawn. Who doesn't love the Wolverines? Not the Russians and the Cubans, in the movie. But we sure didn't love the Fedayeen (in Iraq) or the HIG (in Afghanistan) or any number of other groups of guerrillas, when we were the organized force and we were in their turf.

The word guerrilla in and of itself has an interesting origin. Most casual historians think of Waterloo as Napoleon's big defeat. The Navarre region of northern Spain was really the biggest defeat - strategic and more costly, as Napoleon was tossed after a multi-year slog where he led the "superior" force against the numerically smaller, less trained, less equipped partisans. Thus, guerrilla (little war, in Spanish). Napoleon called this "the fatal knot" (a book of the same name depicts this at length).

Now let's come to today. We've waged war against a country 4x the size of Iraq, which was a hell of a hard guerrilla fight for nearly 20 years but of course we ignore the fuck out of that today. 4x the size, many more people, a more entrenched government, more religiously homogenous (no Kurd region, less Sunni/Shia schism in the populace), and much better armed and resourced. The guerrilla potential is dizzying to me.