“Scott Thomas” has written three pieces for The New Republic. In the first of these, he refers to a neighborhood in Baghdad he says all the soldiers call “Little Venice” because the sewage pipes are always broken, flooding the streets with canals of sewage.

But the only references to a “Little Venice” in Baghdad that I can find on the Internet refer to a neighborhood in the Green Zone where a number of Iraqi officials live (see this article in The American Surveyor or this one on MSNBC.com). This ”Little Venice” apparently has real canals, not rivers of sewage.

Of course, it’s possible that there are two Little Venices in Baghdad — a neighborhood in the Green Zone that’s officially called that and a dilapidated area given that nickname by the soldiers – anything’s possible, I guess. But then there’s this odd detail in the story. Thomas writes that, as he and several other soldiers were changing a tire on their Humvee, “a short but unusually healthy-looking Iraqi kid approached out of my periphery wearing an Adidas hat and snowboarding t-shirt, his lower torso swallowed by one of Little Venice’s excrement canals.”

So this kid allegedly approached the men changing the flat through sewage that came up to his waist. Wouldn’t waist-deep sewage make changing a flat tire a little difficult? Was this Humvee crew equipped with scuba gear?

Meanwhile, Michael Goldfarb at The Weekly Standard writes that TNR remains silent, even as other aspects of this story are falling apart. What gives?