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Both World War 2 and the Civil War are very different from the WoT. We aren't fighting a centralized enemy with a fixed command structure and an industrial/agricultural heartland. Shelling a city or burning farms and plantations makes perfect sense if you're trying to bring about the collapse of a government, but for globe-trotting terrorists whose assets are mostly liquid you need to be more precise. Also, Sherman's objective was to create hardship, not death. Atlanta was evacuated before it was burned, creating a refugee crisis for the south to contend with. He understood that his task was to apply pressure, and that simply burning the city with it's citizens would create no pressure and only strenghten the will of the south to resist.

The same applies in the Middle East and (to a lesser extent) Chechnya. Our duty in this war is to kill the unrepentant terrorists who refuse to lay down their arms and to use our political might to eliminate the root causes of terror: Political repression, lack of education, lack of economic opportunity, and lack of a free and independent press.

Mere devastation has not worked in Chechnya. Putin's war there has shattered organized resistance within the cities, but it also killed thousands and reduced most of Chechnya's major cities to rubble. Grozny is a shell of it's former self, and the resistance has become increasingly more radicalized. A major operation against terrorist groups is called for in the wake of this atrocity, this slaughter of children. However, more destruction will not break the will of the terrorists, it will merely harden the resolve of the Chechens to resist.

Such is not the case in Israel, where they have learned to put pressure on terrorist groups without reducing themselves to slaughter. Suicide bombings are much more rare and not nearly so spectacular before Isreael began applying very effective pressure to the Palestinian people and the terror groups who hide amongst them. Targeted killings, limited operations, destruction of property. Forcing terrorist groups to answer to the citizens that they claim to represent. A suicide bomber blows himself up in a market? Destroy his family's house, turn them into paupers. A man claims to represent the "political" wing of Hamas? Kill him in front of witnesses using a weapon that the Palestinians can not counter, like an Apache. The only real criticism that I have for Israeli methods is that they rely heavily on the stick and not enough on the carrot. They are dealing with their immediate problems, but not working on solving the problem itself.

Create discomfort in the population, work on providing them with alternatives, kill terrorists wherever and whenever you find them.

Slaughter is merely slaughter. It is evil, and is used as a last resort by the unimaginative, frustrated, and morally bankrupt. In embracing it, in calling for it, you cut at the very heart of what it means to be an American.