[pekk]

You have misrepresented what I said to a really breathtaking extent. I never said "the Nazis did it too," my concern was never to justify anyone's behavior.

I am addressing a distortion of history. If you don't recognize that fraught decisions and, yes, the unintentional AND intentional deaths of civilians (and rape, and torture) are an ancient part of war - NOT just by the US or the Allies or even the parties to WWII - then I am sorry to say that something is very wrong with your understanding of war and history. Specifically, it is a very selective understanding; a very conveniently selective understanding, aimed only at imparting a sense that the US is worse than everything else in history.

It isn't helpful to propagate this misunderstanding, by selectively citing ONLY cases where the US has killed civilians (but nobody else, and always out of context). It isn't helpful to equivocate casually between civilian deaths in war, and intentionally killing civilians, as if they were exactly the same thing.

There are important and meaningful changes in how civilians have been affected by war over time. But you are just blowing these away entirely in favor of a simplistic cartoon.

I'm not sure why you would hold me to account for defending the Iraq war, which I have never done, or attribute to me the bizarrely specific claim that 6,000 deaths is "incidental". Perhaps you should address this to someone who supported that war.

[riggins]

It's understandable why DanBC was confused. You wrote:

The Axis, for example, always erred on the side of not hurting any civilians.

I have no idea where you got that idea. Hitler used collective punishment against civilian populations to deter resistance. Stuff like 'for every German soldier that dies, we kill 100 civilians'. The German's also bombed civilian centers like London and Belgrade.