The trouble is, and the real difference from historic resistance movements, that it looks like a lot of Third World resistance movements have discovered revolutionary defeatism. "The worse, the better" was always a silly slogan in South London, but in war zones it's just horrible. A lot of the violence in Iraq is simply aimed at ensuring that there is always enough chaos around to justify a continued American presence. Similarly, there is decent reason to believe that a lot of the deaths in Darfur are a result of rebel militias starting a fight with some Janjaweed and then running off, leaving a civilian population to be massacred in order to hasten the day when the mythical UN peacekeeping force arrives (there are very credibly sourced reports of people in IDP refugee camps being attacked and even killed for attempting to leave the camps and go back home to parts of Southwest Darfur where the peace agreement is holding - their patriotic duty is apparently to stay in the camps and die of typhoid, preferably in front of some cameras).
I think that this tactic was first learned in former Yugoslavia (although Frank Snepp's "Decent Interval", which I am currently rereading, is full of instances of Thieu intentionally causing disasters and weakening himself in order to persuade the Americans to send more aid) and it's spread like wildfire. Part of the whole problem in Iraq is that there are so many militias who don't have any real plan but just sort of believe that it is probably in their long term interests to have things going bang all the time, because it makes it more likely that they'll get handouts from their outside supporters. It is like Milton Friedman's nightmare of a welfare system, applied to terrorists.
The equivalent would be if the French Resistance had intentionally provoked the Germans into committing atrocities in the hope that it would convince the USA to enter the war. I don't think they ever did that.
best dd
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