Just finished reading Caleb Carr's The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians. His basic thesis is that civilians have long been the target and victims of war, and that such targetting weakens the cause of those countries and organizations who engage in it, and often ultimately does them in.
The section of the book covering World War II is provocative — the blitzkrieg fighting of the Germans can actually be considered "progressive" war, though they were abandoned in favor of far more distructive tactics, and the Allies engaged in terrorism — but the really interesting part (for me, anyway) was the chapter covering the United States after the war ended; there are real parallels to what's going on now. "The world must repeatedly be made safe for the development of freedom, a word that, in postwar parlance, began to be used very loosely indeed..." and in order to fight Communism, American agencies were reorganized to serve "national security." This was done under James Forrestal, secretary of the Navy, who pushed for the passage of the National Security Act of 1947 and then succumbed to paranoid schizophrenia. That, in and of itself, is a fascinating story I'd like to learn more about.
Overall, a fascinating book that was a pretty quick read, though there were some things I wish the author had explained in more detail, like Woodrow Wilson's effort to create the League of Nations — he's contemptuous of Wilson's "criminally narcissicistic willingness to sacrifice almost any principle and any cause to his personal holy grail", but doesn't really give enough background. (Did I miss something in history class? Guess so.) Also, some of his suggestions for future policies are troubling, particularly his support of "preemptive strikes." Who gets to decide when they're justified? He doesn't say.
