Patrick Nielsen Hayden isn't happy [*] about having people wearing our flag cutting down citrus and palm trees at the edge of a desert in order to inflict "collective punishment" on the local farmers.
I guess his patriotism, and mine, must be different from other people's.
If things in Iraq are going so damned well, why is this necessary?
Update More detail from Iraqi blogger River. She's not a fan of the occupation, but that doesn't make what she says wrong.
The silence from our side isn't encouraging, either; two correspondents have suggested that cutting down the trees might have been a military necessity (eliminating cover for ambush attacks) rather than collective punishment, but no one in authority, as far as I know, has come forward to say so. The warbloggers, eager to climb all over anything they consider biased coverage, have been silent, which seems to be their standard policy with respect to any sort of news that can't be seen without removing their blinders.
I'd rather believe that U.S. troops hadn't committed a public relations blunder that might also have been a war crime, but so far no one is offering me any help in achieving that belief.
Second update I just figured out that Patrick Cockburn, the author of the original story, is related to and has collaborated with Alexander Cockburn, the Stalinist serial prevaricator. (I recall a 10,000-word essay by Cockburn on Andropov's succession to the Soviet leadership that never mentioned his previous post as boss of the KGB.) That doesn't mean that anything that Patrick writes is a lie, but it means that if you bet on what he says you'd better be sure you have cabfare home. Still, I'd like to hear some actual facts to refute his story.