'We never thought there would be any violence'

A dozen or so of the Freedom Flotilla are dead, the Israelis have received another black mark in world opinion, and the flaming idiots who backed the blockade runners have had their illusions shattered. "We never thought there would be any violence," says the wonderfully named Greta Berlin of the Free Gaza Movement. No, of course she didn't. They never do. They lie down in front of bulldozers, curse at National Guard troops, and throw stones at police, and then express astonishment when someone gets hurt.

Channel 10, a private television station in Israel, quoted the Israeli trade minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, as saying between 14 and 16 people had been killed. He said on Israeli Army Radio that commandos boarded the ships by sliding down on ropes from a hovering helicopter and were then struck by passengers with “batons and tools.”

“The moment someone tries to snatch your weapon, to steal your weapons, that’s where you begin to lose control,” Mr. Ben-Eliezer said....

Indeed. There were some on board who wanted that to happen. Ms. Berlin should have known that, if indeed she wasn't one of them herself. So, of course, should the Israeli military have known it. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

44's non-strategy

I think it's no secret that I am underwhelmed by the president whom GrEaT sAtAn"s gIrLfRiEnD refers to as "44." So much so, that I have been reluctant to diss his new National Security Strategy, for fear my comments would come across as just more snarky stuff from the right wing. But now I have cover! Leslie Gelb, late of the New York Times and the Carter administration, assesses the non-strategy on The Daily Beast. I particularly liked this complaint, which gets to the heart of the matter: "To shape a true strategy, the president must establish and explain priorities. In the Obama document, everything seems to be a top priority...."

Yes! What the president has given us is a State of the Union laundry list. Either Mr. Obama doesn't know what a strategy is, or (even more terrifying) his advisers don't. This feeds rather neatly into a discussion I have been following over on the Kings of War blog, to wit: why is it that the United States is so bad at strategy? (Great at winning battles, lousy at winning wars. It's almost as if we go from aspiration direct to tactics, so we keep ending up in a situation where the thought balloon over the president's head reads: "Uh-oh! What do I do now?") Mr. Gelb's analysis is worth reading, and the KOW discussion is worth skimming. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

USA! USA! USA!

Belated congratulations to Rima Fakih, the 23-year-old Lebanese immigrant who won the Miss USA contest earlier this month. According to Wiki, she is "widely believed to be the first Lebanese American, the first Arab American and the first Muslim to win the ... title." If you ever doubted that the Burkha and indeed the headscarf are a sin against nature, Ms. Fakih ought to settle the question once and for all time. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Tank hits landmine

One of the refreshing things about Taliban propaganda is that the ragheads are blessedly (or is that word politically incorrect?) free of alphabetical jargon. 'US tank hits landmine explosion in Helmand,' writes Qari Yousuf Ahmadi on Voice of Jihad. Of course it wasn't a tank, if the incident took place at all; likely it was an MRAP, a vehicle so new that the military has no name for it, only the acronym for Mine Resistant Ambush Protected. Or a Humvee, which at least can be pronounced, but which is likewise the smoothing out of the acronym for High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle.

Ah, for the days when things had names, however foolish! Tank, for instance--that was a British cover word to hide the fact that they were developing an armored, tracked vehicle to roll over the trenches of World War I. Happily the code word stuck, and we don't have to talk about the ATVROT battles on the Eastern Front.

I think the Taliban are on to something with their homely translations. How much more evocative is "landmine" than Improvised Explosive Device! Perhaps if we could restore our language to its onetime flexibility we would be faring better in the Global War on Terror, Overseas Contingency Operation, Struggle Against Violent Extremism (whose acronym sounded a bit like a call for help), Man-Caused Disaster, or whatever it's called today. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The mega-mosque at Ground Zero

If anyone doubted Americans' capacity for self-flagellation, the Good People of Tribeca wonderfully expanded the limits last night, when a community board voted to allow planning to proceed for a 15-story Islamic center two blocks from Ground Zero. “What better place to teach tolerance," urged one of the residents, "than at the very area where hate tried to kill tolerance?” This seems to have things backwards: it is not lower Manhattan that needs to show tolerance, but the Islamists who did their best to destroy it. What next--a Shinto shrine at Pearl Harbor? A German cultural center at Auschwitz? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

GrEaT sAtAn"s gIrLfRiEnD

The problem with blogs is that they can seem terribly funny, interesting, or challenging at first sight, then the sameness sets in. So I'm always looking out for a new one to add to my blogroll (on the lower right). Most recently I'm enjoying GrEaT sAtAn"s gIrLfRiEnD, who specializes in photos of politically incorrect hotties, along with in-your-face spelling, off-the-wall language, and an apparent right wing sensibility. The lady above is British-born and Muslim-reared Sarah Maple, who in turn specializes in equal opportunity offensiveness. I don't know if she's any relation to the GrEaT sAtAn"s gIrLfRiEnD (maybe they're the same person!) but however that may be, they're as good as a cup of coffee to get me going in the morning. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Europe catches on

Well, the Gray Lady seems to be inching toward the realization that there are limits to government largesse First came the story of Policeman Tassone, drawing a $101,000-a-year pension at the age of 47. Yesterday came a story about the unsustainable level of social welfare in Europe.

“Across Western Europe,” writes Steven Erlanger, “... the assumptions and gains of a lifetime are suddenly in doubt. The deficit crisis that threatens the euro has also undermined the sustainability of the European standard of social welfare, built by left-leaning governments since the end of World War II.....

“With low growth, low birthrates and longer life expectancies, Europe can no longer afford its comfortable lifestyle, at least not without a period of austerity and significant changes. The countries are trying to reassure investors by cutting salaries, raising legal retirement ages, increasing working hours and reducing health benefits and pensions.”

Even more astonishing, Mr. Erlanger credits part of that lifestyle to U.S. military might: “Europeans have benefited from low military spending, protected by NATO and the American nuclear umbrella.” (“Protected by NATO”—that’s rich! Who has provided NATO’s muscle all these years?)

“In Athens, Aris Iordanidis, 25, an economics graduate working in a bookstore, resents paying high taxes to finance Greece’s bloated state sector and its employees. ‘They sit there for years drinking coffee and chatting on the telephone and then retire at 50 with nice fat pensions,’ he said. ‘As for us, the way things are going we’ll have to work until we’re 70.’"

In the good old days, Mr. Iordanidis could have escaped his treadmill by emigrating to the United States. No longer: in New York, a policeman can retire at 44, and with a much fatter pension. Blue skies! – Dan Ford

On working for the government

Let us all be happy for Hugo Tassone, the Yonkers NY policeman who was earning $74,000 a year when he retired three years ago at the age of 44. His pension amounts to $101,333 a year. At 47, he stands to collect several lifetimes’ worth of his not-ungenerous salary in the golden years stretching ahead of him. But what can it be like to be a New York taxpayer, laboring to pay off that obligation, not only to Mr. Tassone, but also to his successor, who no doubt is even now planning for his own retirement? For every active-duty policeman and fireman, in this crazy universe, we bid fair to have two retirees earning half again as much. Piling insult upon injury, they pay no state or city income tax on their pensions.

The same New York Times story notes that at least 3,700 retirees in the state are pulling down pensions of $100,000 a year or more, with the golden palm going to a certain Edward Stolzenberg, who ran a hospital in Westchester County, and who collects $222,143 a year. (Oops! I see that the Gray Lady only credits Mr. Stolzenberg with being “one of the biggest New York State pensions.” There may be bigger ones?)

As it happens, the delightfully named Mortimer Zuckerman wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal the other day, ominously titled “The Bankrupting of America.” Read it and wonder what hope you have for your own retirement. Blue skies! – Dan Ford

From Russia with love

Threat Matrix shows an interminable Taliban propaganda video with some interesting bits along the way, including the above screen shot of three Chechen fighters serving with the Taliban. (There were four in this immediate group.) "Arab" or foreign fighters joined the Chechens in their 1990s battles with the Russian army; now it seems Chechnya is exporting to Afghanistan. The website includes this quote from an American officer: "You can usually tell when they are in the area because accuracy of weapon systems goes up due to their extensive training and combat experience. You can also note almost all of them have a "special" weapon other then the AK-47 and wear a head band..... Specifically what got me was the grenade launcher on the AK-47. These are rarely used by Nuristanis due to the extreme lack of ammunition availability. Their kits also seem of higher quality where most of the Nuristani fighters use their pockets or the common green AK-47 front vest." Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Quartered Safe Out Here

George MacDonald Fraser is best know as the author of the Flashman series of anti-historical novels. Flashman went everywhere the British Empire could find him, not as model soldier but as an arrant coward and all-round bounder. My son-in-law put me onto him. But it turns out that Fraser also wrote one of the finest World War II memoirs that have ever crossed my desk: Quartered Safe Out Here. The title is ironical: as a nineteen-year-old private first class, Fraser wasn't quartered safe; he was on the line in 17th Indian Division's reconquest of Burma in 1944-1945. It's a great yarn, told from long distance--it was first published in 2001.

The war story is a good one, but I also like Fraser's neat juxtaposition of today's dainty sensitivities with the realities of all-out war against a brutal enemy: "The damage that fashionable attitudes, reflected (and created) by television, have done to the public spirit, is incalculable. It has been weakened to the point where it is taken for granted that anyone who has suffered loss and hardship must be in need of 'counseling'; that soldiers will suffer from 'post-battle traumatic stress' and need psychiatric help. One wonders how Londoners survived the Blitz without the interference of unqualified, jargon-mumbling 'counsellors', or how an overwhelming number of 1940s servicemen returned successfully to civilian life without benefit of brain-washing. Certainly, a small minority needed help; war can leave terrible mental scars--but the numbers will increase, and the scars enlarge, in proportion to society's insistence on raising spectres which would be better left alone. Tell people they should feel something, and they'll not only feel it, they regarded themselves as entitled and obliged to feel it."

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Mini Super Tuesday

Well, I was delighted to see Arlen Specter sent into retirement. He was a political opportunist of enduring skill: in 1965, as a registered Democrat, he ran and won as a Republican; in 2009, as a Republican senator with no hope of being renominated, he changed parties again in hopes that Democrats would be more likely to buy his wares.

So there's a mean satisfaction in seeing the turncoat trounced. Beyond that, I don't see much hope for Republicans in what the media have been calling Super Tuesday. The problem for the out party has always been that, no matter how distasteful voters find the incumbents, an election is never about the U.S. Congress--it's about the candidates. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Vietnam wannabes

The Vietnam War just won't go away, will it? The latest public figure to be caught lying about his Vietnam service is the Connecticut attorney general who's running for the U.S. Senate as a Democrat. (Dodging Vietnam service was a bipartisan sport; lying about it seems mostly the province of the Good People on the left, like the historian Joseph Ellis, who not only phonied up war service for himself, but also invented a career in the anti-war movement.) The great mystery here is why the people who were so opposed to the war at the time were later so anxious to associate themselves with it. Burkett and Whitley wrote a book about this phenomenon: Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History.

And don't you love the headline the New York Times put on its story?: Candidate’s Words on Vietnam Service Differ From History. Indeed. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

A first-generation scofflaw

What are we to make of Jessica Colotl, the 21-year-old junior at Kennesaw State University in Georgia? First of all, she is in the United States illegally, having been brought here by her parents (or just her mother; it’s not entirely clear) at the age of eleven. Second, she was stopped by a university policemen and found to be driving without a license. Third, she apparently lied to the cops about where she was living. And fourth, she’s attending the university on reduced tuition as a Georgia resident, though illegals aren’t permitted to claim that $5,000 financial benefit. (Some reports spell her surname Coloti.)

All this is very bad stuff, which the Good People of course want us to overlook: instead of dumping on the scofflaw, they are dumping (of course!) on the police. "Jessica's case is yet another outrageous example of the unaccountable local enforcement of immigration laws in Cobb County gone awry," says Azadeh Shahshahani of the American Civil Liberties Union. (It is one of the richer ironies of this dispute that Ms. Shahshahani was born and reared in that citadel of civil liberties, the Islamic Republic of Iran.)

OTOH, as the children say, my great objection to “Latino” immigrants—both legal and illegal—is that they bring their culture with them and insist that we accommodate it. Ms. Colotl, a member of Lambda Theta Alpha sorority, seems to have cleared this hurdle in fine style.

The U.S. government has made a compromise ruling that gives us the worst of all conclusions: Ms. Colotl can stay in Georgia for another year, while she completes her bachelor’s studies (while paying out-of-state tuition, or more likely having someone else pay it for her). Then she’ll be deported! Isn’t that peachy? We get to invest thousands of more dollars in her education, and Mexico gets the benefit of it. Blue skies! – Dan Ford

Better yet, let’s boycott Massachusetts!

Little observed by the national media is the movement in Massachusetts to boycott Arizona because the state has made it illegal, um, to be in Arizona illegally. The latest to join this folly is Amherst, home of Amherst College and the University of Massachusetts, where a citizen (well, he may not really be a citizen—after all, in Massachusetts who cares?) with the interesting name of Vladimir Morales wants to introduce a resolution to:

* ask that the town manager ensure no Amherst money is spent on goods or services from Arizona;
* encourage residents and businesses or private organizations to take a similar pledge;
* encourage residents to avoid traveling to Arizona.

But wait! That’s not all. Mr. Morales’s resolution would also call upon on national organizations to cancel scheduled events in the state (the 2011 All-Star Game is mentioned in the Amherst Bulletin). But what really brought tears of joy to my eyes was the demand that Congress—the U.S. Congress, I assume, given that it has so little to do at home—“stabilize the economies of Mexico and countries in Central and South America through such actions as the repeal of the North American Free Trade Agreement and decriminalizing certain drugs’. Yes, getting rid of NAFTA should really work wonders at enriching job opportunities south of the border. Blue skies! – Dan Ford

Call it treason II

I earlier blogged about the notion of trying Major Nidal Hasan for, among other things, treason. If it's not treasonous for a company-level officer in the U.S. Army to turn his weapon on his fellow soldiers, because they're American soldiers, what could possibly merit the charge? In the Wall Street Journal today, Yale law professor Peter Shuck discusses this question in passing. As it happens, he doesn't think much of it--too difficult to prove.

But then he poses an interesting alternative: we should revoke the acquired citizenship of would-be murderers like the would-be Times Square bomber. (Faisal Shahzad was naturalized--and swore allegiance to the country that was giving him the green passport that enabled him to travel freely to Pakistan for training--just a year before trying to create a fireball on 42nd Street.) What a satisfying notion! And much more in the American tradition than putting out a contract on the life of Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born cleric who inspired Major Hasan, Mr. Shahzad, and other nutters. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Two ways of looking at a battle

I've added a Canadian blog, Milnews.ca, to my list to check more or less daily. This in honor of its recent post about a gory "battle" in Helmand province, Afghanistan. Here is how the Taliban reported it:

HELMAND, May 11 – As many as 55 Americans have been killed and 37 terribly injured with their three Chinook-like helicopters shot down in clashes with Mujahideen of the Islamic Emirate in Helmand’s Nowzad district through much of Monday, Mujahideen officials said. According to the details, the deadly battle erupted as about hundreds of American cowardly soldiers, airdropped by some 20 helicopters into the different areas of Nowzad district, wanting to carry out a large scale operation in the area, came under simultaneous attacks by Mujahideen from every directions that caused a daylong face-to-face fighting which started on Monday afternoon (May 10) and continued till late night hours, in which the enemy, after suffering deadliest losses and severest damages, fled the areas carrying the engines of the helicopters shot down by Mujahideen during the fighting along with them, while the wreckage of the struck helicopters including their wings and other parts of the helicopters and the mutilated parts of the bodies of the American soldiers still exist at the sites. No Mujahids have, by the virtue of Allah’s bounty and His mercy, been harmed, while Mujahideen have taken the abondoned arms and ammo. Jahidic officials say it is the first operation which has been so much perfect and successful since the invasion of US cowardly troops in 2001, and one of the luckiest operations since the operation al-Fath ( The Victory) commenced throughout the country.

And here's what actually happened:

KABUL, Afghanistan (May 10) – An MH-60 helicopter made a controlled landing after being hit by enemy fire in Helmand Province this afternoon. All crewmembers have been safely returned to base. The helicopter was supporting a combined Afghan-international assault force on a targeted compound near Nangazi, in the Sangin district, and had just begun its return flight when it was hit by enemy fire and forced to make a controlled landing. After landing, the helicopter crew was immediately picked up by additional aircraft. The helicopter could not be recovered and was destroyed in place with close air support. Multiple enemy fighters were engaged by the combined force and several suspected militants were captured at the targeted compound. The assault force and remaining crew have safely returned to base.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

the odd couple

I congratulated an English friend on his country's having a new prime minister, but marveled that the new government is as odd a coupling as a Republican / Farmer-Labor coalition would be in the U.S. He replied: "Yes, strange indeed, except that the leadership should be OK - both Cameron and Clegg went to decent public schools!" Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Why don't they just let the government pay for it?

One of the more amusing aspects of ObamaCare has always been the pretense that somehow government intervention could increase coverage at no cost, meanwhile lowering the deficit. Yesterday the NYT dropped the first shoe:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Letting young adults stay on their parents' health insurance until they turn 26 will nudge premiums nearly 1 percent higher for employer plans, the government said in an estimate released Monday.

Well, do’h, as the children say. Of course mandating that 25-year-old “children” can remain on their parents’ policies was always going to raise the cost of those policies. So will extending insurance to 32 million more people. So will mandating coverage for pre-existing conditions. So will. . . . As for the 1 percent increase, that’s for people who get their insurance from, say, the New York Times. “The new benefit,” notes the Gray Lady blithely, “will cost $3,380 for each dependent.... Parents [who pay for their own insurance] would face an estimated additional premium of $2,360.” Blue skies! – Dan Ford

Not war in the modern world

Oh wow, this is really a great book: The Trojan War: A New History. I gave it to Sally Wife for her birthday, but after presenting it happened to read a few lines. I was hooked. I finished it in three days--well, maybe four. I was so fascinated that I forgot to affix the usual Post-It notes on the places that particularly fascinated me, so I have no quotes to show how well Mr. Strauss relives the days when the Greeks "burnt the topless towers of Ilium." A lot of it is speculation, of course, but it is convincing speculation, based on forensic and even anecdotal evidence. (Though the Greeks hadn't yet hit upon their rather odd alphabet, their enemies to the southeast were literate, so there actually are some records--if indirect--about events on the Dardanelles 3200 years ago.)

It helps of course if you have read Robert Fagles's great translation of The Iliad, or anyhow George Guidall's recording of it.

On stifling innovation

David Brooks, a comparatively sensible opinionator for the New York Times, wrote a rather good column the other day about the U.S. Army’s evolution from smash-and-enter to “Good morning, ma’m, may I help you milk that goat?” Since he works for the Gray Lady, Mr. Brooks of course thinks this is a splendid thing. An Army made up of Good Guys (and Good Girls—I mustn't forget the girls!). Who could be against that?

The catch, though Mr. Brooks doesn’t seems to notice that it’s a catch, comes in the second-last paragraph: “Now some say that the approach codified at Fort Leavenworth has become so dominant that it is actually stifling innovation. This is a complete intellectual sea change.” Actually, it’s not. Stifling innovation is what the U.S. Army does best, and what it has always done. It wouldn’t be so bad if the new dogma were working in Afghanistan, but it doesn’t seem to be. It’s as John Boyd liked to say: “It’s doctrine on day one, and it’s dogma the day after that.” Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

This is how the demos ends ...

Democracy began in Greece, and may well end there. This rather good video comes from AlJazeera, of all places in the world. It shows what happens when politicians buy votes by promising more than they can deliver: the voters burn the ... banks? (To be fair, they probably would have burned parliament if it had been easier to reach.)

Easy to feel superior to the Greeks, but aren't we doing the very same? Where Athens stands today, Sacramento could stand tomorrow, Albany the day after, and the District of Columbia the day after that. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

A Vision So Noble

This small book is the result of three years' work at King's College London (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say Kings' College Online, since I never actually went to London). It combines my MA thesis with two earlier papers that I wrote for the program, and it went on sale on Amazon.com this morning: A Vision So Noble: John Boyd, the OODA Loop, and America's War on Terror.

I've blogged from time to time about John Boyd, but the short version is that he was a colonel who maddened the Air Force and attracted acolytes among its civilian employees for his outside-the-box thinking about aerial combat, maneuver warfare, and the ways in which wars, basketball games, and chess tournaments are won. Arguably he was the greatest American military thinker since Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan. My task was to see how Boyd would have approached the War on Terror. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Lapses? Oh, say it ain't so!

The Gray Lady has a rather ungracious headline this morning: Lapses Allowed Suspect to Board Plane. Good grief. My own reaction was: For once, the U.S. government has done something right! The folks at the New York Times must really live in a world of privilege and ease, if they think that catching a would-be mass murderer in two days is anything less than a splendid bit of copperdom. Good on the New York police, good on the FBI, good on the computer system that allowed the Feds to see that their man was sitting (in coach, I hope) on an airplane still at the gate.

Personally, I would feel somewhat reassured if the Congress took up legislation requiring individuals paying cash for their seats to wait seven days before flying. Heck, I don't even pay cash at McDonald's! Anyone peeling off hundred-dollar bills for an airplane ticket is surely worth a second glance. But I doubt it will happen. More likely, the Congressional reaction will be to hale some hapless cops and airline officials before a public hearing and berate them for their lapses. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Master Sun on long wars

Patrick Moran has published a new translation of one of strategy's great books, which he titles Master Sun's Art of War. It's available as a ten-dollar paperback or a three-dollar PDF download at Lulu.com. I particularly liked this little riff:

When engaging in warfare, make victory the highest priority. If warfare goes on for a long time the troops will lose their edge.

If city walls are besieged, then one's energies will be entangled.

If one exposes one's army to danger for a long period of time, then the resources of the nation will eventually fall short....

Truly, I have heard of cases when armies suffered due to their inelegant haste,but not of armies long enduring through serendipity.

To which Mr. Moran adds a pungent note: "Things eventually go wrong." Blue skies! -- Dan Ford