We have more in common with the occupied citizens of Iraq than we realize. In 1776, the American Colonies were occupied by the British Empire, who's hubris of invincibility lasted well into the Twentieth Century, basically until the Pound Sterling no longer occupied the position of the World's "Reserve Currency." The United States now, like the British Empire then, has had limited success in quelling sedition and self-determined revolution where the fields of battle are rooftops, backyards and bedrooms.
You could be commuting over the Delaware River every morning and you would miss the connection. Few of us associate the place with the historical event two-hundred plus years ago. Our entire warp and woof of "freedom" "independence" and "democracy" like a pebble in a pond, resonates out from an "insurgency" center. It appears that we have forgotten the essence of “the” American holiday of July Four. Who did what to whom and why is no longer part of the marketing strategy for that day.
General G. Washington, and his collection of insurgents ("rag-tags" they were called) paddled through the ice flows on a pre-dawn Delaware, to surprise the "private contractors" aka Hessians, fighting for an over-extended British occupying army. This bold insurgent act surprised the mercenaries, and they retreated.
Ask any mercenary, then or now, what is their prime motivation for fighting. It’s always money. Ask any rag-tag insurgent, then or now, what they are fighting for, and almost always the response is the same: they want to be left alone to determine their own fate, regardless of the outcome. If their world is going to go to hell, they want to be the responsible party, not some occupier.
Yes, history is written by the occupier, the “winner.” The obvious reason that history continues repeatedly to be written in the theme of war is that war does not work. It’s a great tool for wealth generation, but a lousy mechanism for expanding the evolutionary potential of the human race.
