"In 1864, President Abraham Lincoln used terrorism to win the Civil War by unleashing General William Tecumseh Sherman on Georgia, letting him burn everything in his path to break the will of the Confederacy."

You recently may have read that paragraph, or one very like it. Many people in America and abroad seem to feel frustration over the U.S. government's tendency to brand the "terrorism" label on everything it doesn't like while it turns a blind eye to brutality by its allies.

So some people are writing reminders of America's own record of "terrorism." In addition to the genocide of the native peoples and the Vietnam War, the march through Georgia has joined the short list.

However relevant or effective this may be in current events, it's a notable shift in the popular view of history. That view (at least above the Mason Dixon Line) has long regarded Lincoln's cause and conduct as a holy crusade against slavery, armed with the authority of the law and the "terrible swift sword" of the Lord.

The changing tune comes from the liberal/left wing of the American political spectrum. That side has begun to question whether the current Arab-Israeli war might be made of more shades than black and white. And so the same side that always execrates everything Confederate now finds it convenient to wave the bloody shirt over Sherman's march.

There's an undeniable fuzziness in that, but it also may mark a first step toward maturity.

Israel does not lack impassioned defenders in America, on both the left and the right. But some honest Americans have begun to question Sharon's march through the West Bank. As they do so, they discriminate between the ancient poison of anti-Semitism on the one hand and principled opposition to the policies of the government of the state of Israel on the other.

This lifts them out of the morally absolute world and into the harsh real world, where true-blue liberals, on certain issues, find themselves shoulder-to-shoulder with old-school Jew-baiters.

The German theologian Reinhold Niebuhr noted a paradox 50 years ago: America cannot at the same time project its world power and maintain the fiction that it is an innocent, virtuous nation.

We lose the illusion of simplicity, but we gain the chance to find our real ideals and virtues as a nation, rather than the red, white and blue rhetoric of patriotic fantasy.

Perhaps Americans finally are ready to grow up and face their world -- and themselves -- in full.