Well...
Actually Mary Anne I'm against the death penalty. I wasn't always but the high cost of the appeals process and the possibility putting an innocent person to death is not worth it. Good point though.
Here is an (unpleasant) account of battle sans napalm:
Nothing in the first two years of fighting had prepared the soldeirs for these huge losses. In the summer of 1916, British and German soldiers-separated by a desolate, shell-ravaged no-man's-land-peered at each other from zigzagged lines of trenches. Both armies had adjusted to the trogiodyte horrors of trench warfare, where the best weapons often were "clubs, ax handles, daggers, medieval man traps, and crossbows, primitive catapults."1 But even then death came slowly and painfully. Philip Gibbs of the Daily Telegraph reported that "the horrors of the first aid post were standard-men hold their intestines in both hands, broken bones tearing the flesh, arteries spurting blood, maimed hands, empty eye sockets, pierced chests, skin hanging down in tatters from the burned face, missing lower jaws ... men with chunks of steel in their lungs and bowels vomiting great gobs of blood, men with legs and arms torn from their trunks, men without noses and their brains throbbing through open scalps ...."
So how do you find a moral high ground in an action that is collectively immoral?
Would you fault the pitifully under trained and out-gunned Iraqi army for using napalm? Or VX for that matter?
The Iraqis couldn’t see our Stealth planes. Should we have had the planes turn on their transponders so it would be more of a fair fight?
Did we have any right using aerial bombardment to ‘soften them up’ when their air force lay in the dessert collecting dust?
The last two actions and the use of napalm, were design to minimize American loses and are within our accepted ‘laws and customs of war’.
To consider one way of killing ‘more moral’ than another makes as much sense to me as the duel.
Rob