IRAQI TROOPS ARE SHOOTING THEIR OWN OFFICERS rather than fight:

IRAQI conscripts shot their own officers in the chest yesterday to avoid a fruitless fight over the oil terminals at al-Faw. British soldiers from 40 Commando’s Charlie Company found a bunker full of the dead officers, with spent shells from an AK47 rifle around them.

Stuck between the US Seals and the Royal Marines, whom they did not want to fight, and a regime that would kill them if they refused, it was the conscripts’ only way out.

In total, 40 Commando had collected more than 100 prisoners of war yesterday from the few square miles of the al-Faw peninsula that they controlled. Two of them were a general in the regular Iraqi Army and a brigadier. They came out from the command bunker where they had been hiding after 40 Commando’s Bravo Company fired two anti-tank missiles into it. With them was a large sports holdall stuffed with money. They insisted that they had been about to pay their troops, to the disbelief of their captors.

These were the men who had left their soldiers hungry, poorly armed and almost destitute for weeks, judging by the state we had seen them in, while appearing to keep the money for themselves.

Such “leadership” is more common than not among the world’s armies, and probably goes a long way toward explaining U.S. military superiority all by itself. Salam Pax features this quote from Samuel Huntington on his page:

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.

But having officers who don’t abscond with their troops’ pay is, in fact, one example of the superiority of Western ideas, and it’s one that translates rather directly into superiority where organized violence is concerned. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Dictatorships like Saddam’s — which based on history and prevalence might be regarded as the “natural” form of human governance — turn out to be lousy at war. Democracies embodying Western ideas turn out to be a lot better. That’s not a coincidence, however much non-Westerners might wish to believe that it is.

UPDATE: Hey, maybe these protesters were actually Iraqis!