Mileah has found an excellent article

I heard a Marine officer complaining that the insurgents in Fallujah use the locals for human shields. Don't they teach you anything about guerrilla war in the service? The whole idea of guerrilla warfare is to hide in the civilian population. You snipe from the mosque or the kindergarten till finally the occupiers get mad enough to start firing blind at the mosque, the kindergarten, whatever. The people blame the occupiers, not the guerrilla. You're doing the guerrillas' recruiting for them.

It's a little weird, if you ask me, how nobody in charge seems to know all that. After all, we just went through a whole century of guerrilla warfare. Take a world map, point at random and you'll find a country that probably had a guerrilla war in the past 100 years.

But we're acting like it's a shock, like the Iraqis are breaking the rules. That's like calling a personal foul in a bar brawl.

...

That's what the Brits would've done. They've been playing one tribe against the other for hundreds of years. But it was the same old story: Bush's loudmouths wouldn't listen to anybody. They told the Kurds to shut up and stay home, and put ordinary GIs who didn't speak a word of Arabic in charge of crazy hellholes like Fallujah and Ramadi.

Go read the article It really is an excellent read.