Unqualified Offerings

I’ll try to play the “Look Through Your March 2003 Archives” game this weekend. Meantime, Gene Healy shows that, as I’d have suspected, he has nothing much to be ashamed of on that score himself. He also links to a Glenn Reynolds auto-retrospective that includes the sentence:

In other posts, I’ve quoted Talleyrand to the effect that “you can do anything with bayonets, except sit on them,” and that’s what we’ve done.

Clever Talleyrand! But in truth you can do hardly anything with a bayonet. I’ll grant that you can shave with it if you lack a better razor, or spear meat with it if wanting utensils, maybe dig tubers if there’s no trowel handy. Actually, the old-style triangular bayonets would stink at most of those things, and in almost every case there’s a better tool for the job than even the American OKC-3S.

What bayonets are genuinely good for is stabbing people and threatening them, unless they’ve got a bayonet and a longer reach or, worse yet, ammo. The thing is, stabbing people and threatening them is a very tiny subset of all possible human actions and interactions. The internets are not good for getting the full context of Talleyrand’s remarks, but he appears to have meant it as a caution against overreliance on military power. He was foreign minister of a government conceived in high ideals, birthed in terror and ruined, at the end, by the conviction that attacking, and attacking first, was the only appropriate response to every foreign risk. In his own way, Talleyrand himself was trying to point out how little bayonets are good for. He was talking to Napoleon, but he might have been talking to Glenn Reynolds, albeit no more successfully.

UPDATE: Scott Lemieux adds, ” . . . even if Talleyrand did mean that military force can accomplish anything, it means that Talleyrand once made an exceptionally stupid argument, as the Iraq War is demonstrating so tragically.”