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hombres
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST Advertisement
Here's a story no American news organization thought worth covering
last week, so you'll just have to take it from me. In the southern
Iraqi town of Amara, 20 men from Scotland's Argyll and Sutherland
Highlanders came under attack from 100 or so of Muqtada al-Sadr's
''insurgents.'' So they fixed bayonets and charged.
It was the first British bayonet charge since the Falklands War 20
years ago. And at the end of it some 35 of the enemy were dead in
return for three minor wounds on the Argylls' side.
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.'' Or as Cpl.
Jones, veteran of the Sudan, used to say every week on the ancient
BBC sitcom ''Dad's Army'': ''They don't like it up 'em.''
By comparison, a Cruise missile, an unmanned drone, even a bullet
are all antiseptic forms of warfare. When a chap's charging at you
with a bayonet, he's telling you he's personally willing to run you
through with cold steel. The bullet may get you first, but, if it
doesn't, he'll do it himself. To the average British squaddie in
the 21st century, the bayonet's main practical purpose is for
opening tinned food. But when you need it on the battlefield, it's
still a powerful signal of your resolve, your will.
When coalition forces engage the foe in Amara, in Najaf or
Fallujah, that's always going to be the rough ratio: three light
wounds to 10 times as many enemy dead. It's in the broader
political engagement in Iraq that the coalition needs to
metaphorically fix bayonets and go hand-to-hand with its opponents.
The Sunni big shots and Sadr militias, the Baathist dead-enders and
foreign terrorists, the freaks and losers have made a bet: that the
infidels could handle the long-range antiseptic bombing but don't
have the stomach for the messy mano-a-mano stuff that
follows.
And they have a point. From Baghdad press conferences to Colin
Powell, too much of the tone is half-hearted and implicitly
apologetic: On bad days, the president himself is beginning to
sound like an unmanned drone. The coalition needs to regain the
offensive, to demonstrate not just weary stoicism but fierce will
-- the same will those Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders showed.
Bush has to be bold and imaginative, and to end the impression that
he, his administration and America itself are mere hostages to
events.
How do you do it? Many commentators are now calling for faster
elections in Iraq. I'd prefer to go for ''asymmetrical
federalism,'' which is a Canadian term, but don't let that put you
off. What it means is that the province of Quebec has certain
powers -- its own immigration policy, for example -- that the
province of Ontario doesn't.
Obviously, any self-respecting American would regard it as an
abomination if the state of Vermont had a completely different
level of sovereignty from the state of New Hampshire. But not all
nations are as harmoniously constituted as the USA. I'm not just
talking your average banana-republic basket case. Take America's
closest ally: the four parts of the United Kingdom -- England,
Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales -- are governed completely
differently, three of the four having ''national'' parliaments with
widely varying degrees of power, and the fourth (England) having no
parliament at all. Scotland has revenue-raising powers, Wales
doesn't. There's no constitutional logic to it: It's merely the
central government's utilitarian response to different local
conditions.
Something of the sort is already happening on the ground in 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? 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.
That policy of ad hoc, incremental, rolling devolution needs to be
accelerated. Towns and provinces should have as much sovereignty as
they can handle, on the obvious principle that the constituent
parts of ramshackle federations rarely progress at the same pace.
In the former Yugoslavia, Slovenia is now an advanced Western
economy, Kosovo is a U.N. slum housing project. If one were to cast
the situation in rough British terms, the Kurdish areas are broadly
analogous to Scotland, Dhi Qar and other Shia provinces are Wales,
and the Sunni Triangle is Northern Ireland.
Even in the Sunni Triangle, remove Fallujah and the remaining 95
percent is relatively calm. And, while Fallujah hasn't been
removed, it has been more or less quarantined. There have been
fewer lethal attacks in Baghdad in recent weeks in part because
many of the perpetrators were Fallujah residents who used to drive
up to the capital for a little light RPG work in the evening. Now
they're pinned down in their hometown.
We need more of that. 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.
