The only morally justified war that will exist some day is Armageddon. some do call it that.

Frankly i think the use of the word moral is the mistake here. Hence me reffering to Just War principles instead.

I would agree about the notion you can't make killing people a matter of morality. No one should ever be killed.

I think the only moral war is the one where another nation attacks you, and you have no choice but to defend yourself. That may be the only moral war.

Now, there are some just wars where you are defending your allies. I don't really buy too much into the 'We're doing this to help poor, impoverished people' - If that was the case, we would help out in the Rwandan conflict, East Timor, Darfur, Burma, ect. The truth is that there are lots of horrible, abysmal people out there doing some awful things. I think that one strategy the west can employ is that of social traffic - that is, if you don't like what *they* (the aggressors and abusers of human rights) don't like what is going on, then move to a nation that will treat you fairly. That way, you aren't involved in conflict, benefit by new population groups, and remove the threat from the aggressor.

Yes, Neville, it is a moral and just war, and it is about damn time Obama announced that guys will have reinforcements on their 6. Although the cadets were nodding off at his speech @ WP.

All war is hell. The point is to defeat the enemy no matter the costs. Something about all's fair and all that jazz.

The Allies against Hitler in WWII was a moral and justified war.
Finland attacking the Soviet Union in WWII to take back his land was a moral and justified war.
USA in Somalia was a moral and justified war (although calling it a war rather than an operation maybe is stretching it).
USA against the Serbs in the Yugoslavian civil war and against the Serbs in Kosovo war were moral and justified wars.
USA against the Talibans is a moral and justified war.
Israel has started a couple of moral and justified wars.

The list goes on and on.

But at cost to whom? Us? Them? Civilians on either side? Who is the enemy, what is the mission, etc, etc.

These are the sticky questions that prevent morality from ever properly surfacing in war. It's extraordinarily difficult to strike the right balance between stopping the bad guys and just running roughshod over a sovereign country and people. What UN peacekeeping troops often do is not moral, because its generally not enough to stop the killings, and what the US has done in the past few wars has been amoral, because it often involved total destruction of a sovereign country's infrastructure (especially in Kosovo. We pretty much leveled Yugoslavia).

The loss of life is likely much lower with the use of the nuclear weapons against Japan than a full scale invasion through Japan.

Maybe so.  Still, what country is asked to help out when the shit hits the fan?  That would be us, the USA.  We will complete the mission, and bomb the hell out of terrorists and not complain.  Every war has c.d.  Every war is justified in different ways.  The bombing of N and H is justified in US eyes b/c it would have saved millions of more lives and ended the war in '45 instead of '50.  It is a slippery slope but one that requires a sense of perserverance and commitment.  If we thought it was amoral then we would have left the mission (any conflict in history), the same with any other nation.

^ One nuclear bomb would have been enough though, I think.

Even at all of the damage and suffering witnessed at Hiroshima, the Japanese government didn't want to surrender.  http://library.thinkquest.org/26742/hiroshima.html#surrender

The only reason we did not bomb them more than 2 times is b/c we ran out of nukes.