I was riding my motorbike yesterday and was thinking about how great Japanese engineering was, such that I was able to have a 60 hp engine driving a bike weighing under 400 pounds and the fact that the engine was so small in actual space taken up. And for whatever reason, my brain made a synapse switch (I think 'cause I was reading about the story behind the second atomic bomb dropped on Japan a few days earlier) and I started wondering about why the Americans thought it was okay to drop not one, but two, bombs that they knew would kill thousands and thousands of innocent civilians. In the Army, not only now, but back in World War II, soldiers were instructed to treat civilians as just that, civilians, and as such, were not to be shot, killed, raped, or otherwise taken advantage of. Of course, the moment a civilian picked up arms, they were no longer considered a civilian, but that's another matter. So, that being said, why is it okay to bomb the crap out of civilians? And it wasn't just the Americans. We (Canada), along with the British and other Commonwealth countries) did it too, as did the Germans. As a professional soldier, we train such that our job is to defeat the professional soldiers of other countries, not to defeat the general population.
We tell our soldiers not to loot or steal possessions of an enemy country, but it's okay to mutilate with bombs dropped by our bombers, those possessions along with the civilians? I don't think so.
Bombing industrial targets is one thing, but targeting cities and killing civilians, well, that is just plain wrong.