Fix Bayonets

May 26 - Ghost of a Flea sent me this link to a Steyn column in the Chicago Sun-Times, Don't give Iraqis self-rule all at once.

Mark refers to events from a Sun (UK) leader (since expired) (UPDATE: link to article in the Scotsman on the engagement here) which Flea had referred to here about a group of Argyll and Sutherland highlanders who fixed bayonets and charged after coming under fire in Amara.

As always, Mark gets it:

If you're used to smart bombs, unmanned drones and doing it all by computer back at HQ, you're probably wondering why a modern Western army is still running around with bayonets at the end of their rifles. The answer is that it's a very basic form of psychological warfare.

''If you're defending a position and you see someone advancing with a bayonet, you may be more inclined to surrender,'' Col. Ed Brown told the British newspaper the Guardian. ''I've never been bayoneted, but I can imagine it's pretty gruesome.''

Resolve in battle and politics means using all the tools in your box.

Of course, the column is about more than the use of a bayonet charge in modern warfare (it is Steyn, after all) and looks at something very basic to the future of Iraq:

There are some 8,000 towns and villages in the country. How many do you hear about on the news? For a week, it's all Fallujah all the time. Then it's Najaf, and nada for anywhere else. Currently, 90 percent of Iraqi coverage is about one lousy building: Abu Ghraib. So what's going on in the other 7,997 dots on the map?

The "news we trust" is curiously silent on that point, but probably because it's hard to report much news when one's views are filtered through a poolside perch in the Palestine Hotel.

In the Shia province of Dhi Qar, a couple hundred miles southeast of Baghdad, 16 of the biggest 20 cities plus many smaller towns will have elected councils by June. These were the first free elections in Dhi Qar's history and ''in almost every case, secular independents and representatives of nonreligious parties did better than the Islamists.'' That assessment is from the anti-war anti-Bush anti-Blair Euro-lefties at the Guardian, by the way.

President Bush made much the same point in his speech Monday night (see Towards a Free Iraq below) and the theme is the same: grass roots democracy is the well-spring from which consensual government is nourished and protected.

The best bulwark against tyranny is a population that knows the benefits of freedom, as the Iraqi Kurds do. Don't make the mistake of turning Iraq into a dysfunctional American public school, where the smart guys get held down to the low standards of the misfits and in the end they all get the same social promotion anyway. Let's get on with giving the Kurdish and Shia areas elected governors and practical sovereignty, province by province.

And then fix bayonets and stick it to the holdouts.

Posted by: Debbye at 08:20 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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