Reacting Quickly Quotes
Grant’s overall strategy of attrition of the Southern troops and interdicting supplies and targeting Southern manufacturing and transportation was taking its toll and the Confederates tried a desperate gamble. Robert E. Lee’s tried to attack the Union in the North—Pennsylvania and Maryland threatening Washington and hoping to force the Union to sue for peace. But that left the Eastern part of the Southern heartland relatively undefended. Grant and Sherman, noting the opportunity, then sent Sherman to take Atlanta and destroy all the factories, railroads, and warehouses of food, arms and munitions, then march to the sea and back up the Atlantic Seaboard, freeing slaves and destroying anything and everything that could support an Army and putting enormous pressure on the Southern men fighting with Lee to return home and prevent starvation as there were now few slaves to work the farms. It was the stroke that, as intended, crippled the Confederacy’s ability to wage war. But Grant and Sherman both credited the Southern strategy with opening the opportunity—hence it was the Confederacy that “planned” Sherman’s March. The details of the plan were worked out by Sherman and his staff.
The same line was used by President Ronald Reagan when he was shot in 1981.
His catastrophic failure however was when he supported the Neocon ideology that Iraq had a nuclear bomb about to be deployed and urged a preventative war invading Iraq. Not only was there no bomb ready for deployment, there was net even a nuclear research or development program to do anything nuclear.
