Channeling Garth Turner

I didn't pick up on this sentence by the Globe and Mail's Doug Saunder's when doing this post:

Lest anyone think this is a soft or peaceful process, Cdr. Dwyer's base was rocked, every minute or so all day, by the terrifying shock of its line of 155-mm howitzers firing their village-destroying shells over the hills and into the Korengal Valley ["Commander Dan Dwyer of the U.S. Navy...runs the provincial reconstruction team just to the south, in Asadabad"].

Eerily familiar to the apparent words of a currently Liberal Canadian MP (h/t to John B for his comment at Daimnation!).

Update: Another approach to using artillery when faced with militants in a village: the Wehrmacht in the Ukraine, late 1941 (p. 264 of this edition in translation of Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte):

...Suddenly a shot rang out from the village and a bullet hissed by his ear.

"Halt!" shouted the officer. The column stopped and a machine gun belonging to the rear battery began firing at the houses in the village. Other shots had followed the first one, and gradually the firing of the partisans became livelier, more insistent and angry. Two artillerymen were hit. The officer spurred his horse and galloped along the column shouting orders. Groups of soldiers, firing on the run, moved off through the fields to surround the village. "Man the guns!" shouted the officer. "Destroy everything!" The partisans continued firing. Another artilleryman was hit. Then the officer flew into a terrible rage; he galloped through the fields urging the men on and placing the guns so they would bear on the village from all sides. A few houses caught fire. A hail of incendiary shells rained on the village, bursting open the walls, piercing the roofs, rending the trees, raising clouds of smoke. Fearlessly the partisans kept up their fire, but very soon the violent artillery fire turned the village into a pyre. And there, from amid the smoke and flames, a group of partisans, their arms raised high, ran out. Some were old, the majority young, and among them was a woman. The officer leaned over the saddle and looked them over one by one. Sweat was dripping from his brow and streaming down his face. "Shoot them!" he said in a harsh voice, a pressed his eye with his hand. His voice was bored, perhaps even the gesture with which he pressed his eye expressed. Boredom.

"Feuer!" shouted the Feldwebel. After the rattle of the tommy guns was over, the officer turned and looked at the fallen. He made a sign with his riding whip. "Jawohl," said the Feldwebel firing his pistol into the pile of corpses. Then he raised his hand, the gunners harnesses the horses to the guns and the column formed and started off down the road.