British Bulldog gets in fight

Fire of Liberty
In the July 23, 2005 issue of The Times, Ben MacIntyre has written a wonderful Op/Ed calling asking what Winston Churchill would have done or said in this current fight against al Qaeda. In this wonderful piece, MacIntyre dug deep into the history books and the wonderful mind of the great Prime Minister to lay out a very smart piece that notes how the British Bulldog, through his past history of fighting the Mahdi's army in Sudan, had a pretty keen eye on how big of a fight you have on your hands when your up against forces like these Islamic fundalmentalist that plague us today. Just look at what MacIntyre had to write about Sir Winston and his views in this matter:

For such a determined personality, Churchill could be maddeningly inconsistent. Yet on the issue of Islamic fundamentalism, his views were pungent, precise and astonishingly prescient. In The River War, his account of the reconquest of the Sudan that ended in the battle of Omdurman in 1898, Churchill anticipated many of the themes that preoccupy us today: the nature of terrorism, Islamic fanaticism and the clash of civilisations between the Islamic world and the West.

“Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytising faith,” he wrote after going into battle himself against the Dervishes, the followers of the Mahdi, the self-proclaimed prophet of Islam who had launched a mass rebellion to drive the infidels out of Egypt. Churchill writes as an enthusiastic imperialist, comparing the “fanatical frenzy” of the Mahdi’s followers to rabid dogs. But his analysis is more nuanced than the language suggests. He understood that extremism flourished amid the “fearful fatalistic apathy” in the Muslim world — precisely the apathy that Britain’s Muslim communities must now urgently combat. Rather than condemn the Dervishes as mere lunatics (as many of his contemporaries did), he sought to understand their suicidal bravery through the “mighty stimulus of fanaticism”.

In a passage that presages his staunch resistance to Nazism 40 years later, he wrote: “I hope that if evil days should come upon our own country, and the last army which a collapsing Empire could interpose between London and the invader were dissolving in rout and ruin, that there would be some . . . who would not care to accustom themselves to a new order of things and tamely survive the disaster.”

Once again, that bright shining "glow-worm" has found his way to weave himself back into the course of human history even after his death some 41 years ago. In fact, from what I've read on various military blogs being operated by soldiers in the field, Churchill's book The River War is required reading for our soldiers and officers operating in Iraq. So it seems ole Winston is back just when we need him the most. I hope Blair is diving into this book for some insightcoveniant it covienent to read MacIntyre's great piece. I could really help.