What we have accomplished, two

Reuters for June 24 reported that

[s]tudents in the Shi'ite Muslim religious Iraqi city of Najaf said that police recently arrested and beat several of them for wearing jeans and having long hair.

"They arrested us because of our hair and because we were wearing jeans," said student Mohammed Jasim, adding that the arrests took place two weeks ago in the city, the spiritual heart of Iraq's newly dominant Shi'ite majority.

"They beat us in front of the people. Then they took us to their headquarters, beat us again, shaved our heads and tore our clothes.

"When we asked what we had done, they said that we had no honor," he told Reuters this week.

Police, not surprisingly, disputed the students' version, saying they had received complaints about young men acting "improperly."

"We didn't oppress any freedoms. We detained them for a while and after we knew that they were students, we released them after they pledged they wouldn't do it again," Colonel Najah Yasir told Reuters.

However, Colonel Yasir declined to describe just what was "improper" about the students' behavior and, it appears, wouldn't say just what "it" was that they promised not to do again.

But I suppose it doesn't matter, does it? After all, don't those students know there's a war on? (Actually, I suspect they do.) And don't they know a war is no time to be different? How un-Iraqi of them!