What will happen to the national mood when the news programs start broadcasting images of the brutal measures our own troops will have to adopt? Inevitably, there will be atrocities that will cause many good-hearted people to defect from the cause.

--David Brooks today

So Brooks joins the New York Post and Daily News and Trent ("just mow the place down") Lott in calling for some My Lais in Iraq.

Well, we're getting there:

At the same time, the Army's efforts to counterattack against the guerrillas have resulted in a rising number of civilian deaths.

The problem is most severe around Falluja and Ramadi, cities west of Baghdad, where a rebellious local population has repeatedly clashed with units from the 82nd Airborne Division, which prides itself on its tough combat skills.

When Americans do respond, Iraqis say, they have sometimes struck in the wrong place and at the wrong people...

In an operation one night last month, soldiers from the 82nd called in an airstrike at 2 a.m. to bomb a farm outside Falluja, killing three people and wounding three others. The unit's public affairs officer said that the dead men were guerrillas and were the targets of precision fire.

But to local Iraqis, such attacks can look less than precise. At the farm a few hours after the attack, bomb craters were scattered around the yard, and bullets had punched holes all over the site. Two of the three people wounded were children.

--Alex Berenson in the Week in Review, New York Times, 11/2/03

That was in Sunday's paper -- before the Chinook shootdown, which was in Falluja. It's really working, isn't it?