Yup.

And in a similar vein, if you don’t like SUVs, don’t buy one or drive one. And if you don’t like school vouchers, don’t use ‘em.

[Mod Note]: If you don’t like what you read here, there a big wide blogoverse out there for you.

How scary is that??

Heavens, no! But I also knew the reference was a little obscure, even if I was highly entertained by my own wordplay. I thought I’d add a little background for the crowd. Thanks for asking, but please know, I’m not one of these people who goes through life with a open receptors for taking or finding offense. Good on ya. . .

I never call it a war, so my preference would be post-INVASION Iraq.

Sherman did not attack Macon (as you correctly note), nor did he attack, Augusta. Savannah was captured by Sherman in December, but nothing there was destroyed. Sherman demanded that the city officials remain in place and provide police, fire and other services for the city. Sherman demanded that the city return to normal life. Contrast this with the US firing the police and other government officials in Baghdad and allowing looters to plunder the city. Sherman did not destroy “cities” in GA with the exception of Atlanta. He marched primarily through rural areas destroying food that could otherwise supply the confederate army.

Sherman did destroy other state capitals as symbols of the confederacy. In addition to Milledgeville, Sherman also destroyed Jackson, MS and about 1/4 of Columbia, SC. Sherman’s army made a swath of only about 60 miles through GA, a state that is almost 300 miles long or about 1/5 of the total. Most of the area in Georgia was plundered but not completely destroyed. However, much of the swath through SC (blamed by the North for starting the Civil War) was totally destroyed as “punishment”.

The same General Sherman who marched through Georgia also gave us “40 acres and a mule”, the policy that gave the liberated black slaves that followed his army to Savannah agricultural lands abandoned by plantation owners. Instead of placing the former slaves in camps with handouts, Sherman issued them the land and tools to start on a new life farming their own 40 acres. Contrast that with our Iraq policy of marginalizing the Iraqis and giving the rebuilding to outside contractors! Sherman was also lenient in his terms with former enemies, so lenient in fact that his removal was threatened if he did not renegotiate the final surrneder of the Confederate Army at Raleigh. Sherman most of all feared that the Confederate Army would not disband but would break up into small units of partisan warfare. Sherman wanted to avoid that outcome and did everything he could to re-establish former soldiers to their former way of life.

The point is that the US Military has a history of doing occupations and preventing insurgencies and that history was ignored by the Bush administration. Sherman would never have conducted the kind of campaign waged in post-war Iraq.