Just two buddies, doing what they can!

President Obama is taking some well-justified heat for telling the "president" of Kazakhstan that, like the Kazahks, Americans are still trying to get our democracy right. (As if to reinforce the point, that's Mr. Nazarbayev sitting in front of the American flag, while Mr. Obama poses in front of  the Kazahk national banner.) To make matters worse, one of the president's aides assured a reporter that yes, indeed, Mr. Obama has taken some "rather historic steps to improve our own democracy since coming to office here in the United States." Perhaps he was referring to passing a health-insurance overall over the opposition of a clear majority of voters?

Max Boot, no great admirer of the Obama foreign policy, argues that we should cut the president some slack in this matter--that any president of good sense will grease the wheels with some mighty unpleasant characters. Maybe so. But it does seem that Mr. Obama is obsessed with making friends with those who stand against us, while dissing those who would stand with us. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Fighter Pilot

Here's a fine book about a fine man: Fighter Pilot: The Memoirs of Legendary Ace Robin Olds. It's a posthumous autobiography, put into shape by his daughter Christina and by Ed Rasimus, who wrote the magnificent Vietnam memoir When Thunder Rolled. (Note that if you buy the two books together at Amazon.com, they total $25.80, which qualifies them for free shipping in the U.S.)

And here's my review of the book in the Wall Street Journal today. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

A mission to Katyn

Shantih (peace) to the president of Poland, killed with all his companions on a flight that was to have commemorated the 20,000 Polish officers murdered by the Russians so they'd pose no obstacle to the Soviet takeover of that country in 1945. First Poland was raped by the Germans, then by the Russians, and left to half a century of foreign rule (dressed up during the Soviet era as a People's Democracy). But the Katyn massacre finally emerged in all its Stalinesque brutality. Now that eastern Europe seems likely to be abandoned again by the United States, the Polish president was on his way to salute the dead, and incidentally to mend fences with the newly emergent Russian almost-empire. It seems that nothing turns out well when it involves Moscow. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

There is also the story of John Boyd

I wrote my thesis at King’s College London on the maverick Air Force officer and military strategist, John Boyd. So I was pleased to know that the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, held him up as a model of sorts to the cadets at the Air Force Academy recently:

“There is also the story of John Boyd – a brilliant, eccentric, stubborn, and frequently profane character who was the bane of the Air Force establishment for decades. As with [Billy] Mitchell, tact wasn’t Boyd’s strong suit – and he certainly shouldn’t be used as a model for military bearing or courtesy. After all, this is a guy who once lit a general on fire with his cigar.

“As a 30-year-old captain, he rewrote the manual for air-to-air combat and earned the nickname “40-second” Boyd for the time it took him to win a dogfight. Boyd and the reformers he inspired would later go on to design and advocate for the F-16 and the A-10. After retiring, he developed the principals of maneuver warfare that were credited by a former Marine Corps commandant and a secretary of defense for the lightning victory of the first Gulf War.

“It strikes me that the significance of Mitchell, [Hap] Arnold, [Bernard] Schreiver, and Boyd and their travails was not that they were always right. What strikes me is that they had the vision and insight to see that the world and technology had changed. They understood the implications of that change, and they pressed ahead in the face of incredibly fierce institutional resistance.”

Blue skies! – Dan Ford

Washington gridlock

Gotta love the headline in the WaPo: Nuclear Security Summit promises gridlock for downtown D.C. Right, and that's about all that it promises. For one thing, Israel won't be there, and of course neither will Iran or North Korea. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The Surge worked. Get over it.

As a junior officer in the U.S. Army, Andrew Exum began blogging under the nom du web of Abu Muqawama, and he continues now that he’s an analyst at the Center for a New American Security. Mr. Exum is hardly on the same page as James Taranto, whom I also read every day—Andrew in the morning, James at happy hour—so I am always pleased when his perception matches mine. Here he is on the subject of The Surge:

"Ever since my friend and mentor Tom Ricks concluded at the end of his book The Gamble that the Surge succeeded tactically but failed strategically, it has been safe among others to say that the Surge -- for all the heroics of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps -- failed. Andrew Sullivan and Tom write this regularly on their blogs, and because they are serious people, others parrot what they say. At some point, though, evidence gets in the way of their conclusion."

Indeed it does—unless, as Andrew wryly remarks, you keep moving the goalposts. So here’s a tip of the virtual hat to the American servicemen who made it possible, and to the American president who had the wisdom to change his strategy and the courage to double down on his investment in Iraq. The Surge worked. Get over it. (Tom Ricks, by the way, is another blogger that I check more or less daily. I was impressed by his book, though skeptical of its conclusion, as I pointed out in my review for the Weekly Standard.) Blue skies! – Dan Ford

Catch and release

Congratulations to the Dutch Navy, whose sailors rappelled down from a Lynx helicopter under covering fire and retook the freighter Taipan from pirates. The pirates didn’t resist, and indeed why would they have bothered? They were taken into custody aboard the frigate Tromp, which last month released 33 pirates captured in similar circumstances. Two hundred years ago, pirates were summarily hanged by whoever took them prisoner. Now that we have the United Nations to take care of our international problems, no one is sure who has jurisdiction over pirates, so the general principle is catch-and-release. Blue skies! – Dan Ford