Nihilistic insurgency

There's an interesting piece in the New York Times by James Bennet, on the tactics of the insurgents in Iraq:

American forces in Iraq have often been accused of being slow to apply hard lessons from Vietnam and elsewhere about how to fight an insurgency. Yet, it seems from the outside, no one has shrugged off the lessons of history more decisively than the insurgents themselves.

The insurgents in Iraq are showing little interest in winning hearts and minds among the majority of Iraqis, in building international legitimacy, or in articulating a governing program or even a unified ideology or cause beyond expelling the Americans...

Rather than employing the classic rebel tactic of provoking the foreign forces to use clumsy and excessive force and kill civilians, they are cutting out the middleman and killing civilians indiscriminately themselves, in addition to more predictable targets like officials of the new government...
.....
Counter-insurgency experts are baffled, wondering if the world is seeing the birth of a new kind of insurgency... or if, as some suspect, there is a simpler explanation.

"Instead of saying, 'What's the logic here, we don't see it,' you could speculate, there is no logic here," said Anthony James Joes, a professor of political science at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia and the author of several books on the history of guerrilla warfare. The attacks now look like "wanton violence," he continued. "And there's a name for these guys: Losers."

I hope they are indeed losers, but whether they are or not, I'm more surprised by the baffled experts than by what baffles them. It's not as if the tactics of an insurgency can just be chosen at will; they will depend on the political character of the insurgency itself, as well as on the general context of the conflict, in particular the relative military strength of the opposing forces. The point about the political character of the insurgency is illuminated by a later passage from Bennet's article:

[I]nsurgents in Iraq appear to be fighting for varying causes: Baath Party members are fighting for some sort of restoration of the old regime; Sunni Muslims are presumably fighting to prevent domination by the Shiite majority; nationalists are fighting to drive out the Americans; and foreign fighters want to turn Iraq into a battlefield of a global religious struggle. Some men are said to fight for money; organized crime may play a role.

Given this composition and these aims, it isn't really open to those fighting against the Iraqi government and the coalition forces to fight either a relatively 'clean' or a democratic war. Bennett also writes:

If the insurgency is trying to overthrow this regime, it is contending with a formidable obstacle that successful rebels of the 20th century generally did not face: A democratically elected government. One of the last century's most celebrated theorists and practitioners of revolution, Che Guevara, called that obstacle insurmountable.

I don't know about insurmountable, but the point has some weight. (Thanks: Tony H.)