A thought about American policy

John Lewis Gaddis in his book, The Cold War: A New History, describes the history of the United States chartering the CIA to conduct espionage and sabotage against countries with which the United States was not at war, to overthrow foreign regimes that the administration did not agree, and even to commit assassinations. Not only did presidents lie to the world, but they lied to cover up acts that were shameful. He sees this as a departure from previous policy towards a more Machiavellian one.

The American Experience television program, The Bombing of Germany, chronicles a change in American policy during World War II. At the beginning of the war, President Roosevelt set a policy that the United States would not attack civilians and air force leaders accepted significant losses of planes and airmen in daylight bombing that focused on strategic targets and sought to avoid collateral damage to civilians. However, later in the war the policy changed, and American forces deliberately bombed civilian areas of Berlin, fire bombed Dresden and Tokyo, and used atomic bombs on two cities in Japan. The program sees this progression as a new departure in American policy.

150 years ago, the first battles of the Civil War began a process in which both sides learned that set battles would not destroy the losing army. Eventually the war was won by the Union embarking on "hard war". Grant besieged cities and beat them into surrender and surrender of their defending forces and accepted huge losses in the Wilderness campaign to inflict final destruction to the Confederate Army of Virginia. Sherman on his march to the sea sought explicitly to bring the war to the people of Georgia and South Carolina, not just to the Confederate armies.

Someone who understood the brutality of American slavery and of the American Indian policies should not have been surprised by American willingness to war against civilians and to be duplicitous about its propensity for violence. Indeed, Americans seem to have been more successful about fooling themselves about its policies than in fooling others.