> US stopping the Nazis First of all, the US didn't stop the Nazis. The Allies did. Saying the US stopped the Nazis belittles the sacrifices of all the other g

> US stopping the Nazis First of all, the US didn't stop the Nazis. The Allies did. Saying the US stopped the Nazis belittles the sacrifices of all the other great nations that worked together and those that suffered the civilian cost of that wretched war -- and I say that as a German. Secondly that analogy is incredibly misleading. The Nazis wore uniforms. They were clearly identifiable. Nazi Germany was a formal nation state with a government and institutions. Unless you're going to argue for ethically questionable decisions like the firebombing and carpet bombing we're talking about mostly military engagements against military targets. But yes, even in a "just war", if you kill someone, you know for a fact you're killing someone and you don't know you're saving lives. It's how you justify the killing but it's not the act itself. You save a life by pushing someone away out of the way of a falling tree. You don't save a life by killing them. I don't know what is so difficult to understand about this. This doesn't mean you can never make a moral argument for killing someone or that you can't ever say with high confidence that a killing will likely result in lives being saved, but it's an extremely important distinction. If a bank robber points a loaded gun at a hostage and threatens to kill them and you have every reason to believe them, it's easily justifiable to kill them rather than wait for them to pull the trigger first. If a nation state declares war and invades another country, it's easily justifiable to kill their soldiers and lieutenants. But you're still killing people. Calling it "saving lives" is a moral judgment, not an objective description of what you're doing. It describes the motive, not the action. Using it as an objective description assumes the motive is honest and exclusive. I'm not sure whether you're aware of this, but nobody ever started or joined a war simply to "save lives", even the US didn't join WW2 until they were directly attacked and decided to retaliate rather than remain isolationist.