I am shocked--shocked!--that you would arrest our spies!

Vladimir Putin, the former Russian spymaster and now prime-minister-no-doubt-for-life, is terribly upset that the FBI arrested a bunch of his deep cover spies, including the slinky Anna Chapman, who posted this photo among others on Facebook. What has espionage come to? Was she hoping to "friend" David Petraeus?

Mr. Putin's outrage (at least partly feigned, I suspect) is of a piece with the recent condemnation of Arizona for passing a law making it illegal for anyone to be in the United States illegally. It is no longer sufficient to scoff at laws we don't like. Now it follows that we must condemn those who would enforce the law, whether it be the FBI or the Arizona highway department. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

24 despots

Hugo Chávez  has made Foreign Policy's list of odious despots, though only at No. 17: "The quack leader of the Bolivarian Revolution, Chávez promotes a doctrine of participatory democracy in which he is the sole participant, having jailed opposition leaders, extended term limits indefinitely, and closed independent media. Years in power: 11"

Raul Castrol weighs in at a comparatively benign No. 21, presumably because he's only been choking Cuba for two years. FP's writer overlooked the half-century that Fidel wore the same uniform. Still, the list is fascinating, as always. A curious thing: all the despots are men! Evidently there's still a glass ceiling when it comes to dictating. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Saint David and the Romans

The Romans had bread and circuses. We have the United States Senate, which is even now going through the ritual motions of advising and consenting on David Petraeus's appointment as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. A week ago it was Obama's War. As of tomorrow it will be Petraeus's War. The most amusing aspect of this ritual is that, while the president could fire Stanley McChrystal for little or nothing, he can't fire Saint David for anything, not even if he goes trash-talking to the New York Times. If he does, he very likely will find himself running against the former four-star general in November 2012. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On what General Petraeus can deliver

The New Yorker, which can be good reading when Hendrik Hertzberg is on vacation, has a Talk of the Town in its July 5 issue on the change of command in Afghanistan. George Packer is articulate and (surprise!) downbeat on whether David Petraeus can actually pull the president's irons out of the fire:

"But disarray among top personnel is almost always a sign of a larger incoherence. American goals in Afghanistan remain vague, the means inadequate, the timetable foreshortened. We are nation-building without admitting it, and conducting counterinsurgency on our own clock, not the Afghans’."

Well, of course we're nation building!  Whoever said otherwise? But Mr. Packer's is a refreshingly honest appraisal of a difficult situation, and for that we can thank George W. Bush. If he were still president, Hendrik Hertzberg would never have allowed anything sensible to be written about the war he launched. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Lord, make me chaste! (but not yet)

The G-20 nations have met in Toronto and pledged to reduce their governmental deficits by 2013. Mr. Obama is a bit nervous about that, despite the fact that his second term will be decided one way or another by the time the G-20 follow Saint Paul into a more admirable lifestyle. (Indeed, there is some talk about punting chastity into 2016, by which time it won't matter at all, except to Hugo Chavez and a few other presidents-for-life.) Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Bye bye, Mr. Soviet Pie!

Though he still  hangs on in Russia, the country he brutalized for thirty years, Josef Stalin got the boot this week in his home town in Georgia--formerly a Soviet republic, now a more or less independent nation. (I say "more or less" because officials removed Uncle Joe in the dead of night, to avoid protests by those who still regard him fondly--and not just in Hollywood.) Stalin will be replaced by a statue commemorating Georgia's resistance to a Russian invasion two years ago, provided Moscow doesn't finish the job in the near future.  Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

General Petraeus or General Save Us?

Remember the odious ad from MoveOn.Org, when another president was trying to get a handle on another difficult war? Well MoveOn.Org would rather you forgot. A day or two ago, the advertisement vanished from its website, along with the page that explained just why David Petraeus was a treasonable militarist who “cooked the books” for the White House. Now that the general isn’t pulling Dubya’s irons out of the fire in Iraq, but Obama’s in Afghanistan, he has become Saint David to the loony left.

The general seems to be very good at what he does, which includes getting along with presidents. If only he'd leave some of that spinach in the trunk.... Blue skies! – Dan Ford

McClellan, MacArthur, McChrystal

You may be sure that it wasn't Casual Friday when President Obama fired General McChrystal today. (The photo, from the Rolling Stone article that ended the general's career as CINC Afghanistan, was taken during their earlier, ten-minute meeting, ages ago in Washington time.)

Abraham Lincoln fired George McClellan for good cause--he wouldn't attack.

Harry Truman fired Douglas MacArthur for good cause--he marched to the Yalu and then wanted to nuke China for attacking the UN forces in Korea.

Barack Obama fired Stanley McChrystal for--for what, exactly? Being incautious when a reporter was around? Oh dear!

I read the Rolling Stone article yesterday (didn't everyone?).  I thought it was a pretty good piece of journalism, except where Michael Hastings noted that the problem with counter-insurgency was that it required "huge numbers" of troops. Mr. Obama's mini-surge involved 30,000 men. I suppose Mr. Hastings (nor Mr. Obama, for that matter) wasn't yet born in June 1944, when we put 30,000 Americans on a single beach in a single day, and 1,465 of them died, from a nation only half the size of today's United States.

The other amazing thing about this kerfluffle is that everyone is shocked--shocked!--at the impolitic language used by Gen. McChrystal and his aides. (It was mostly his aides, you'll notice, if you actually take the time to read the article.) That's how soldiers talk, for crying out loud.

Today, the president of the United States had a chance to show that he was a bigger man than the general he put in charge of his "necessary war." Instead, he proved that he was a whole lot smaller. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The new face of the Republican party

Congratulations to South Carolina Republicans, who have just nominated Nikki Haley for governor. She was born Nimrata Nikki Kaur Randhawa, a first-generation American whose parents are Sikhs from Armritsar in northwest India. She won 65 percent of the vote against a white, male six-term Congressman.

That's so wonderful that the New York Times needed another two paragraphs to get to the news that South Carolina Republicans also nominated Tim Scott for Congress. Though his American roots go back further than Ms. Haley's, Mr. Scott is black. The man he defeated was the son of the great segregationist and Dixicrat candidate for president, Strom Thurmond. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Country Northward

Thirty-five years ago next month, I put some stuff in a pack and walked across the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The distance was one hundred miles, the elapsed time two weeks. I kept a journal on the trail, and afterward I turned it into this book, which was published by a friend in Somersworth, N.H., then by Countryman Press, and more recently in a very inferior reproduction by the Authors Guild Back-in-Print program. Now I've updated it, and it's available as a $12.95 paperback from Createspace. Later: and here it is as a $4.99 e-book for Amazon's Kindle device. Ain't instant gratification wonderful? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On meeting the Champ

I have a passion for the Piper J-3 Cub, but it's been getting awfully difficult this summer to book time on Zero Six Hotel, the 1946 Cub that I have been renting for the past several years. (An hour at a time, I should  add.) Hampton Airfield used to have a rental fleet consisting of Zero Six Hotel, plus a wartime lookalike that once served the Massachusetts National Guard as a liaison aircraft, plus a modern update called the Legend Cub. But the last two each suffered a "hard landing," as the euphemism goes. The L-4 is still being rebuilt. The Legend has been nicely restored, but the owners wisely decided not to put it out for rental any more.

J-3 Cubs in good condition are hard to come by, and they are correspondingly expensive. (As an indicator of how much better Cubs have fared than the U.S. dollar, Zero Six Hotel went out the door in August 1946 for $2600. Today we are required to carry $60,000 insurance in order to rent it.) So the airport settled instead on a 1948 Aeronca Champ.

I held out for a while, but yesterday I got Bill Rose (those are his shapely legs beneath the door of the Champ) to check me out in Seven Five Echo. The fact that the Champ's engine could levitate me, Bill, and 18 gallons of fuel on a muggy day is proof that it has virtues unknown to the Cub. Its flaws are also real, especially those hydraulic landing-gear struts. On my second takeoff, I lifted the tail so as to roll down the runway on the two main wheels, whereupon the plane began to toss itself like Sancho Panza in the blanket: oopah, oopah, oopah! It will be a while before I essay a wheel landing in the Champ. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

'We're all working for the government now'

So says a realtor in Casa Grande, Arizona, as reported today in the New York Times. Those government-created (and now government-owned) agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have spent $149 billion of the taxpayers' money on mortgages that went bad. It is the most costly bailout in the history of mankind.

 It costs, on the average, $10,000 for the government to sell one house, cleaning it and replacing stolen appliances and filling the swimming pool. Among other things, Fan and Fred pay $80 for a contractor to mow the lawn, every couple of weeks. Nationwide, the lawn guy is costing us $10 million a month. And of course that's only the overhead: the house will likely be sold for half the cost of the mortgage that Barney Frank cosigned on our behalf. But at least that realtor in Casa Grande is making a good income!

"I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing," as Mr. Frank famously said of the "liar loans" Fan and Fred were underwriting in 2003. Can you imagine how long BP's Tony Haywood would hold his job if he had been as spectacularly wrong as the Congressman? All Mr. Haywood did was spill some oil. Barney Frank spilled the American economy. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The future of AfPak II

On a somewhat more elevated level than GrEaT sAtAn"S gIrLfRiEnD's interview with Major Mike (see below), Andrew Exum and Max Boot are throwing digits at one another over the American role in Afghanistan. Mr. Exum, who posts under under the nom du web of Abu Muqawama, started the exchange on June 16 by suggesting than the 'Stan was "the graveyard of assumptions." He listed some of those assumptions (for example, that the war is simply a clash between the Hamid Karzai government and the Taliban) and argued that each was wrong. Mr. Boot fired back the very same day: "where there's a will, there's a way." (It used to be that we all read the New York Times, and as a result we all thought the same way, though we might reach different conclusions. Now we all read the same blogs.)

Mr. Exum updated his blog post in response. Mr. Boot  fired back: "Yes, we can" win in Afghanistan, because the people prefer the Karzai government, with all its warts, to the Taliban. Unlike most revolutionaries (Lenin, Castro, Mao, Ho....) the Taliban have been in power before, and the people didn't like it. And again, Mr. Exum updated his blog--a pity he didn't argue at more length. It's an argument worth having, though it seems to me that the end result of Max Boot's faith in the power of national will is simply to pour more of America's treasure and youth into the Afghan graveyard. That's a long distance from Major Mike's notion that we should pull out the troops and let the Green Berets have a got at it. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The future of AfPak

GrEaT sAtAn"S gIrLfRiEnD, who is fast becoming my favorite blogger, has an interview with Major Michael Few about the future of the Afghan/Pakistan wars. In short: "By October, the Taliban will retreat for the winter, and we will declare victory. By next summer, we will withdraw and turn the mission over to the SF boys (a CJSOTF plus) as should have been done in 2002 and last summer to concentrate on FID with a renewed State Department effort." If you strip out the acronyms, Mike is saying that we should turn it over to U.S. Army Special Forces, aka Green Berets, and like-minded professionals, the same men who managed it so well in 2001.

GrEaT sAtAn"S gIrLfRiEnD seems to be a young woman named Courtney. I'm reasonably sure that's not her in black panties: she just likes to pepper her blog with provocative images of female hotties, provocative especially to the Islamicists. That being the case, how can I do otherwise when posting about her work? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Governmental Petroleum II

Good grief, even the New York Times has noticed! In one of those "news analysis" pieces that seemingly were invented for the express purpose of raking George W. Bush over the coals, the Gray Lady today looks at Mr. Obama's record as an antagonist of American (and now British) business. He fired the chief executive of General Motors. He forced Chrysler to merge with an Italian company. He bullied Wall Street firms into cutting bonuses and insurance companies into rolling back premiums. And now he has told British Petroleum to cut its dividend and make a $20 billion down payment on a slush fund to be overseen by the same gentleman who ran the government's payout to the victims of 9/11. In other words, the assets of even a foreign corporation belong to the president of the United States, just as if they were assets of the federal government, to be dispensed according to his wishes.

Really, this is not a good idea. It might have been designed by an academic with no notion of how the real economy works. If Mr. Obama wanted to scare the bejesus out of American and foreign businessmen, to convince them not to invest or to expand or to bring on new hires--and thus to perpetuate the Great Recession--I can't think of a better way to do it. The Gray Lady expresses it more politely, of course: "The question is whether the cumulative effects of these actions create an impression that, over the long run, may make it harder to persuade both American and foreign corporations to cooperate with Mr. Obama’s program to reinvest and reinvigorate the American economy." Blue skies! -- Dan Ford
 

Governmental Petroleum

First there was Governmental Motors, then ObamaCare. Now we have the president of the United States telling a foreign oil company to transfer $20 billion from its stockholders to Americans who feel aggrieved by the oil that has been spilled in the Gulf of Mexico. The occasional journalist is bold enough to refer to this as 'extra-legal.' A more honest term would be 'extortion'.

Not much has been said lately about Mr. Obama's notion that BP ought to pay the wages of the 25,000 or so workers thrown out of work as a direct result of Mr. Obama's moratorium on offshore drilling, but the $20 billion slush fund will be administered by an American, appointed by the president, and there's no question in my mind that checks will be written to the men whom the president has thrown out of work. In other words, money that used to belong to BP stockholders will now be paid out to Exxon employees.

Hugo Chavez must be slack-jawed with admiration and envy. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

From Jeep to Humvee to JLTV

The Jeep served the U.S. military from 1942 to the 1980s, when it was replaced by the ponderous Humvee. Now the Humvee is considered venerable, as well as vulnerable, and the Army and Marines are looking forward to their next light truck. (The Jeep weighed 2300 pounds ready to roll. The Humvee weighs 6000 pounds. The Joint Light Tactical Vehicle is supposed to come in at 13,000 pounds, with a payload of 7000 pounds.) Above is a promotional video for the cutest of the three contenders, on offer from the British defense firm BAE and the American truck manufacturer Navistar. And here's a story in the Wall Street Journal about the tradeoffs involved. (Fuel economy is not mentioned.)

The only pet name I can derive from JLTV is Jilltiv, obviously a nonstarter. So here's a thought: we could call it an armored car. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

We could call it 'Islamicism'

Mighty Joe Lieberman has a worthy op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this morning, complaining that our recently released National Security Strategy affirms that the United States is at war, but defines the enemy as "violent extremism." I've always mistrusted phrases that can be turned around and still be meaningful. ("This nation, going forward, is at war with extreme violence!" . . . .One must never omit the ruling idiocy of the day: going forward.)

Senator Leiberman prefers the Bush-era term: violent Islamist extremism. "The United States is definitely not at war with Islam," he writes. "But a group of self-identified, extremist Muslims has definitely declared war on us, a war which they explicitly justify by reference to their religion." Well, VIE is a start, but I think it could usefully be defined even more strictly: Islamicism. That's the term I will use, going forward. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Chavezism to the rescue

We haven't heard much in the past couple of days about Mr. Obama's plan to bill BP for the wages lost by the 25,000 oil-rig workers that he (the president) threw out of work with his moratorium on offshore drilling. Perhaps Joe Biden pointed out the chances of that holding up in court? Anyhow, Mr. Obama has gone to Plan B:

WASHINGTON — President Obama for the first time will address the nation about the ongoing oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday night and outline his plans to legally force BP executives to create an escrow account reserving billions of dollars to compensate businesses and individuals if the company does not do so on its own, a senior administration official said on Sunday.

“The president will use his legal authority to compel them,” said Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman. Mr. Gibbs did not elaborate on the legal basis for such a move but said that White House lawyers have been researching the matter for days.

I quote at some length because the New York Times story has been subtly altered overnight, to make the president's move slightly less unnerving.

First Mr. Obama wanted BP to suspend its dividend. Failing that, he wanted to bill the company billions of dollars to pay the consequences of a wrong-headed presidential decision. Now he plans "to legally force" the company to set up an escrow account.

Really, this is the sort of tinpot posturing one would expect from Hugo Chavez, who is currently running Venezuela's economy into the ditch. In the first place, BP is a private corporation (and a British corporation at that), not the plaything of the American president. In the second place, only BP has the expertise to stop the oil pouring out of that hole in the ocean floor. How much of BP's considerable talent is focused this morning on stopping the blowout in the Gulf, and how much on coping with the blowout from Washington? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Call them nitwits

The Atlantic has a hilarious if perhaps over-optimistic essay about Osama bin Laden & Co: "Our terrorist enemies trade on the perception that they’re well trained and religiously devout, but in fact, many are fools and perverts who are far less organized and sophisticated than we imagine." It's not just the homegrown variety, the hapless Underwear Bomber and his soulmate in farce, the Times Square Bomber. Routinely, argue the authors, jihadists blow themselves and their friends up when they perform the ritual group hug before setting out to off the infidel. And those aren't the only rituals they perform! Read it and snicker.

The authors also have a serious point to make: we should "work to undermine some of the myths built up around our enemies by highlighting their incompetence, their moral failings, and their embarrassing antics. Beyond changing how the Muslim world perceives terrorists, we can help ourselves make smarter counterterrorism choices by being more realistic about the profile and aptitude of would-be attackers."

 The first part at least could have been written by John Boyd. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Turkey's pursuit of peaceful resolutions

Here's one that I missed, because it wasn't on the front page of  the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, my daily reading: a few days before Turkey led the rest of the world in condemning Israel for using violence to stop a blockade-runner heading for Gaza, the Turkish air force was bombing a neighboring country! This from the Daily Star of Beruit, dated May 21:

ANKARA: Turkish warplanes on Thursday bombed dozens of Kurdish rebel targets in neighboring northern Iraq, in one of the biggest raids in recent years, Turkish media reports said.

About 20 fighter jets took part in the operation that targeted positions of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the Zap-Khakurk region of the Kurdish-held autonomous north of Iraq, the NTV news channel reported. 

Nearly 50 targets were hit in day-long missions carried out mainly on intelligence passed on by the Unites States, it said.

The Anatolia news agency reported that the strikes were ordered after a group of PKK rebels were detected on their way toward the Turkish border from their mountainous hideouts in northern Iraq.

NTV said the operation, the second this month, was believed to be a success although there was no immediate confirmation of possible losses to the rebels.

Evidently such bombing attacks are routine along the Turkish-Iraqi border. Can you imagine the universal condemnation that they would have aroused, if it had been Israel bombing Hezbollah targets in Lebanon?. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Clear and present danger

Writing in the WSJ this morning, Daniel Henninger has a hilarious (and scary) take on what the Gulf oil spill says about government's ability to do anything about it, or indeed about anything much. In his telling, we are the people of Oz, and Mr. Obama has been revealed as the wizard who promised much but can't deliver. Worse, government is too often the source of our problems: "Now government's inefficiency has become indefensible and its fantastic costs, its oceanic spending, a clear and present danger." So the regulators were too cozy with the oil industry? Wow. Nobody could have predicted that. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Meg Whitman dot com

Mini-super-Tuesday turned out to be Ladies' Day: Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina, Blanche Lincoln, Nikki Haley, Sharron Angle.... The NYT paints Senator Lincoln's victory over a far-left opponent as proof that incumbents can win "even in a toxic environment," but really, doesn't she only prove that it pays to be sensible, even when your party has a filibuster-proof majority in the senate?

But what intrigues me most about the California primary was the proposition calling for non-party primaries. It passed. If California is still America's trendsetters--think freeways, swimming pools, Taco stands, calling the boss by her first name--2010 may be the beginning of the end for Democrats and Republicans both: it takes a centrist to win a contest like that. And if June 8 is any indication, all the centrists will be women. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On blaming Israel

Now here’s a really astonishing thing: for days we were bombarded with sound and video about the botched Israeli seizure of the Turkish ferry, Mavi Marmara. Only rarely was a word written in Israel’s defense, and those mostly by online bloggers—and they were written words, never as effective as the stuff dressed up and fed to us by Robin and George on Good Morning America. Yet what does the American public think about the fracas that left nine “activists” dead?

Rasmussen made this question the subject of its nightly telephone poll (which is conducted by voice recording, on the theory that people will be more honest with a machine than with a human interviewer)? Here are the results:

* 49 percent blame the activists for the bloodshed
* 19 percent blame Israel
* 32 percent aren’t sure

Fascinating. Blue skies! – Dan Ford

Apologize this!

Victor Davis Hanson is a splendid historian--he wrote, among other things, A War Like No Other, about how the Spartans and Athenians did Greek civilization to death. He is also a bit of a right-winger--he writes for, among other venues, Pajamas Media. What set him off yesterday was the Turkish ambassador's demand that Israel apologize for its attack on that ferry running the Gaza blockade:

"If anyone might be offering apologies, it should be Ambassador Tan, or at least an explanation for why a ship left a Turkish port headed for a planned confrontation. A ship, it should be added, staffed in large part by the Insani Yardim Vakfi organization, which according to American and European intelligence chiefs is a terrorist organization with ties to al-Qaeda — an apparent conclusion that formerly a Turkish government used to share when it periodically raided the IHH’s compounds.

"But on a larger point, the sanctimonious tone of Tan’s piece is depressing. Turkey currently quite illegally and against world opinion sponsors the occupation of Cyprus. Nicosia is a far more divided city than Jerusalem. The Turkish government has killed far more Turkish Kurds than the Israeli government has Palestinians; it has zero tolerance for foreign human rights organizations that have wished to investigate the treatment of Kurds in Turkish prisons."

Emphasis mine. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Rachel Corrie redux

The Irish-flagged Rachel Corrie, named for a silly American who thought she could stop a bulldozer, has been seized and diverted to an Israeli port. The Irish government and the Israelis had previously agreed that the boat would come into port voluntarily for its cargo to be inspected, but the "activists" who are running the operation predictably refused. Martyrdom is their goal, after all. But the passengers and crew disappointed them: there was no resistance.

This time, Israel says it will let the previously banned construction materials (cement, mostly) go through to Gaza. If that's meant to placate Nicolas Sarkozy and the UN Human Rights Council, I doubt it will have much effect. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Good news from Columbia

Congratulations to the people of Colombia, who have set Juan Manuel Santos on the road to the presidency. Unlike some of the despots who receive abrazos from the Washington establishment (Hugo Chavez comes to mind, as does the would-be despot Manuel Zelaya), Colombia's president will duly step down when his term is finished, and the voters will have the opportunity to name his successor. How refreshing! Sr. Santos is well ahead in polling for the June 20 election after winning a solid plurality in the runoff earlier this week.

I missed this bit of news, since the front page of the New York Times (and indeed the Wall Street Journal) was otherwise occupied this week. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Thanks, but no thanks

True to its original offer, Israel has sorted out the "humanitarian" aid from the intercepted Turkish ferry and sent it on to Gaza. One problem: the Gazans have refused to accept it.That figures. The blockade running was never about relieving a "humanitarian crisis"; it was about giving Israel a black eye, and with the help of western media (and western leaders in desperate need of something other than their own failures to talk about) it has succeeded brilliantly.

Not that you'll hear about it on CNN, but the issue here is construction materials--that's what Hamas wants, and that's what the ferry was delivering in large quantity. The wheelchairs are just window dressing. Either Israel resists, and gets condemned by the likes of Turkey (which meanwhile is persecuting Kurds, and which not long ago was massacring  Armenians). Or else Israel lets the stuff go through, and it will be used to build bigger and better smuggling tunnels and rocket launchers ... and the guns next time. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On taking a ship with paintball guns

Aviation Week has a hard-headed comment on the Israeli landing on that Turkish ferry--or perhaps I should say, on the day Israeli took the bait the Turks and Gazans had laid for it. In particular, the writer gives a vivid description of the initial drop, and one you're unlike to hear on CNN:

As each commando, armed only with paint guns, rappelled down the from a helicopter, he was immediately besieged by a violent crowd, beaten, stabbed and assaulted with flying objects. Some were pushed down into the hold and stripped of their anti-flak vests first. Only when reinforcements boarded the ship were weapons used to disperse the furious chaos, which raged uncontrolled aboard the ship's upper and lower decks.

Paint guns!  It's easy to second-guess men in combat (because that's what they were in, armed only with toys), so let's just say that the vaunted Israeli intelligence service seems to have dropped the paint-ball on this one. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Fast roping 101

I don't know where he found it, but Abu Muqawana has a wonderfully graphic comment on the IDF's botched assault on the Martyrdom Flotilla. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

From Gaza to YouTube

I would have wished for more detail, but it does seem pretty clear from this IDF video that there was a quite a riot aboard that Turkish-sponsored cruise ship trying to run the blockade off Gaza. One of the Israeli marines was almost certainly "thrown to a lower deck," as it's generally phrased--thrown off a roof onto a parking lot, in landlubber's terms. Nobody seems to be asking the obvious question: whatever happened to passive resistance? "They are people who seek martyrdom for Allah, as much as they want to reach Gaza, but the first is more desirable," in the words of one admirer. 

Max Boot has some sensible thoughts on this debacle. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford