Lessons From Stabilizing Fallujah | Small Wars Journal

" as Americans we tend to think of ourselves as individuals and in Iraq, people have a variety of identities and loyalties: they are loyal to their village, clan, family, tribe, ethnicity, and religion. Trying to understand these other identities from an American point of view is really important. The key is to make sure you don’t simply mirror image the local population and project upon them motivations that they simply don’t have. You need to understand the world from their perspective."