Just War and Total War

I found an excellent defense of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombing as a comment in Winds of Change. The whole post is very good and many of the comments are thought-provoking.

UPDATE: Reflecting on my own comparison of Iraq to the Civil War, I left a comment about the morality of that:

from jj mollo on May 13, 2005 01:43 AM

So, can we still think of the Civil War as a just war? No great emergency. The South wasn't going to overwhelm the North and impose an evil regime. Was there an excuse for Sherman's tactics? I happen to think there was. I think we need to be supremely tolerant of others. We should bend over backwards to make excuses for them, but there comes a time when something has to be labeled as evil. When the evil is clear, whether it is contained or not, we must commit ourselves to ending it, using all necessary force commensurate with the evil.

5/12/2005 8:48PM EDT