Awesome. (Ex: "Too soon?")
UPDATE: Schmedlap is, of course, totally right about this:
I'm not real keen on making fun of the [Israeli] troops. I don't think they had much say in the matter and they actually did everything right. It takes a lot of balls to fastrope into an angry mob, knowing that you will likely get your ass kicked, and to respond first with non-lethal weapons and only escalate to lethal force after getting an ass-whooping. What went wrong was not the fault of those troops. What went wrong occurred above the tactical level ... Mock the decision makers, not the guys whose asses were left flapping in the wind (literally).
I can't disagree with any of that. And I hope no one got the impression that we're trying to make light of what happened to these dudes, though I suppose that's pretty obviously what the graphic looks like it's doing.
More than anything, I think the reason this causes a chuckle is that it underlines the absurdity of the situation in which these Israeli troops found themselves. It's an illustration of the timeless military maxim "shit rolls downhill" -- some poor bastard is left hanging on a rope because his government decided to "man up."
That said, Schmedlap is 100% right.
