I found this article interesting in that I don't know much about this particular campaign from WWII, and it appears there is much scandal connected with it. Considering Obama is going to Dresden this week, this article attempts to set the historical record out clearly. It is a valuable review for the informed and uninformed.
But for many critics, the Dresden raid has come to symbolize the wrongs of the entire Anglo-American air war against Nazi Germany. For these critics, who are as strong on the far left as on the far right, the attack on Dresden was only the most egregious example of the Anglo-American conduct of that campaign, which they allege constituted a war crime.
The city of Dresden, thus, is the focal point of an effort to establish a degree of moral equivalence between the Western Allies and Nazi Germany and, more broadly, to discredit and criminalize U.S. and British foreign policy when--as in 2003 in the Iraq War--it moves in a direction the critics dislike.