Jay Tea comes close to doing just that, but then defers to John Hinderaker for a bit of a different approach to the same question.

Jay:

Last night, I had a post almost all written out in my head. I was comparing the “insurgents” in Iraq to the Democrats in Washington, and it was not overly kind. The key element is that neither group seems to have any goals or plans or vision of its own, preferring to simply oppose whatever George W. Bush wants or says. Further, since both have failed when confronting him directly, they’ve turned their wrath on those who support him (Iraqi civilians, presidential nominees).

He then links to John’s posted critique of the NYT article, indicating he was beat to the punch.

Hinderaker posted commentary written by Dafydd ab Hugh which takes apart the inherent bias in the question the NYT is asking, namely “What is the goal of the unsurgents?”

The Times assumes that the killers in Iraq are, in fact, “insurgents.” But insurgents have a political plan; no matter how brutal they may be, they see their violence as leading to a political change — the government will be cast out to be replaced by a new government, typically themselves. Thus, they tend to create shadow directorates that mimic the functions of a government; they have spokespeople who explain their political goals; they try to seize territory to prove they can run it better than the current regime, solving for the people there whatever burning issue is driving the insurgency (land distribution, famine, whatever).

His conclusion?

Rather, the best historical precedents are the Aztecs, who turned mere human sacrifice into an art form by killing more and more and more people until they literally may have slaughtered an end to their own empire. Their intent was not to achieve some political goal; they already ruled. Rather, they developed the theological notion that the more people they butchered, the more pleased their bloody gods would be.

With that gloss, the Iraq “insurgency” comes suddenly into crystal-clear focus, like the beginning of the TV show the Outer Limits: the killers in Iraq have no political goal. That is not the point.

The point is to kill. They have invented a whole new kind of murder… they are serial spree killers.

Then Jay comes back around concluding:

While I’m a little annoyed at John for ruining my piece, I’m also a bit grateful to him. I was on the verge of drawing a comparison between the Democrats in Washington and the terrorists in Iraq, and that was a smidgen extreme, even for me. While I think they are myopic, obstructionist, contrarians, deluded, and wrong-headed, (and in a few cases, loathsome and despicable), to compare duly elected American officials with those who torture and behead innocents for no other real reason than to simply get their sick jollies is crossing a line I’d rather not.

The conclusion by Dafydd ab Hugh:

Widen your mind. Let’s not try to shoehorn every “mysterious” event into the gloss of twentieth-century liberal ideas about political revolution and leftist insurgency. In Iraq, we are not fighting Ho Chi Minh; we are fighting modern-day Aztec priests who want to kill their victims for no reason other than to cut their hearts out and offer their bleeding, still beating hearts to Huitzilopochtli… so let us set our strategy accordingly.

As a side note, since Powerline gives no linkage, I’m still trying to figure out who Dafydd ab Hugh is. It’s a bit of unique name in these parts, so assuming this is not the John Smith of another culture that I’m not familiar with, then it appears this may be the science fiction author by the same name.

And while Hugh thinks that a better analogy for Iraq than Vietnam is the Aztecs, Image Thief points to a piece in the NYT by Peter Maass who thinks it’s more like El Salvador.