Well, Uncritical Iraq War Supporters Certainly Have Sat On Many Metaphorical Bayonets

Recently, I wondered about the reliability of Glenn Reynolds’s claim–invoked yet again–that Talleyrand 1)said that “you can do anything with bayonets, except sit on them,” and 2)that he actually meant this as an endorsement of the Green Lantern Theory Of Geopolitics. Jim Henley answers:

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.

This isn’t surprising. But, at any rate, it’s all beside the point; 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.