You make some good points, but many of your examples are based on the assumption that there were alternatives that would have accomplished the same thing with fewer casualties (I've been hearing this a lot lately.) Sometimes there are, and sometimes there aren't.

I've beaten the dead horse about alternatives in Iraq until even the maggots are flat. Nobody has come up with anything other than either the military option or leaving Saddam in power, although there seems to be a lot of faith that there MUST be such an alternative if we just think about it hard enough for another decade or so. And meanwhile, what is Saddam doing?

It's worth noting that we traded American lives to save Iraqi lives, and are getting zero credit for this. If you say, "only fifty or so," well, who's doing math now? If Iraqi lives were worthless to us, we could have ended this war in thirty minutes without a single American foot soldier leaving our borders.

How would you have defeated Japan with FEWER deaths than the nuclear option? There has been a lot of revisionist history lately saying that there were such alternatives, based on what we know now. Wasn't that easy back in 1945.

Given that the Chechen theater was wired to explode by demonstrably suicidal terrorists, killing everyone instantly, what would you have done that would have resulted in FEWER deaths? Was the death from the gas intentional? Or just a mistake?

A lot of this is hindsight, and God knows a lot of decisions would be easier looking back on them later. Military people have to make decisions like this all the time, and thank God I don't have to.