1. Jane Mayer's lengthy article in the New Yorker on the National Security Agency should be required reading within defense policy circles because it raises so many good questions about domestic spying, classification, and how we prosecute leakers. I like Mayer's reporting a lot, as I've made clear in the past, so I'll only pause to take issue with one thing in her article: I have a tough time having any degree of sympathy for those who leak classified information -- even when that information exposes a problem in or abuses of the system. And I think Mayer intends for us to pity her protagonist, who is being prosecuted for feeding information to a reporter for the Baltimore Sun. (The protagonist claims none of the information he leaked was classified, though it was cut-and-pasted from SECRET documents.) I found myself nodding along with the guy who told Mayer, "To his credit, he tried to raise these issues, and, to an extent, they were dealt with. But who died and left him in charge?" Exactly right: the system breaks down when every Tom, Dick, Harry and Jane gets to decide what gets released to the media and what does not. Unsurprisingly, journalists have a more sympathetic view toward those people who feed them scoops than do those whose jobs and lives are made harder by their colleagues leaking information.
2. Egypt: Why Are the Churches Burning? by Yasmine El-Rashidi in the New York Review of Books.
3. Kim Dozier on the Osama bin Laden raid. Kim is much admired within the special operations community, and her excellent sources and contacts inform this great article, which incorporates inside information (and leaks) without compromising OPSEC ...
4. ... but John Kenney gets the real scoop on the raid, interviewing several SEALs and printing their testimonies.
5. Confessions of a Vulcan: Dov Zakheim explains how the Bush Administration screwed up Afghanistan.
6. Finally, the Modern Library has re-issued Shelby Foote's Civil War Trilogy with a series of introductory essays. The first essay, by Jon Meacham, correctly places Foote within a very specific social and literary context in central Mississippi in the early 20th Century and notes the influence of the salon of William Alexander Percy. My scarily erudite paternal grandfather, actually, grew up in the exact same time and place, and it was a crazy one: on the one hand, it was in some ways a Third World country, yet on the other hand, it managed to produce a ridiculously disproportionate number of the Twentieth Century's men of letters. (And women, of course, because you can't forget Eudora!) Having only read the section on the Gettysburg Campaign previously, I started the first volume of the series last night and had trouble putting it down.
So Google chooses today to celebrate the achievements of a brutal totalitarian regime (that one of its founders fled!) instead of the 150th anniversary of the war that freed the slaves and unified the United States of America. Super.
Reading Grant's memoirs, it's hard -- even for a Southerner -- not to admire the cold-blooded competence of William Tecumseh Sherman. But then...
What Sherman finally decided on was the annihilation of the city itself—an instructive example, as it were, for other Southern cities; or if you will, an act of terrorism. Earlier he had warned Atlantans to "prepare for my coming." In his written orders he couched the warning in terms of obliterating everything of military value, but, as in so many other places his army visited, the reality was destruction of the town by fire—the 19th century's version of carpet-bombing.
This kind of devastation was relatively unprecedented for Sherman's time; the burning and sacking of cities had more or less gone out of fashion as the customs of "civilized" warfare had generally foreclosed the molesting of civilians.
Sherman defied this sense of military restraint almost from the beginning; in fact, his earliest pyromaniacal urges in connection with Southerners and their property seem to have developed in 1862, while he was in charge of the recently captured city of Memphis. There, in retaliation for Confederates shooting at Union steamboats from the Arkansas side of the Mississippi, Sherman ordered the torching of all towns, villages, farms and homes for 15 miles up and down the river. ...
It is hard to reconcile the peculiar psychology of Sherman's military tactics with the fact that these were his fellow Americans whose homes were being burned—mostly women, children and old men, at that. For despite all his hard-bitten declarations against the Confederacy and its supporters, Sherman, in his private correspondence, often made a point of expressing an abiding fondness for the South and the Southern people.
With his victory at Atlanta, Sherman solidified himself as an American hero—in the North, at least—and ensured what Lincoln's ally Sen. Zachary Chandler called "the most extraordinary change in publick opinion here that ever was known." The South's hopes to exploit Northern discontent and wring a "political victory" from the war vanished.
Eventually, Sherman's scorched-earth tactics validated a new standard for military operations—the notion of "hard war" or "total war," in which civilians were no longer treated as innocent bystanders and their property became fair game. This policy was incorporated, improved and refined over the ensuing decades, reaching its most pitiless apogee at Hiroshima in 1945.