@Gatorubet, this take strikes me a deeply wrong on both a legal and moral level.
On the legal side, it’s perfectly fair to say “the dead and their families don’t care about intent,” but third parties most certainly should and do. I even think you’re a lawyer, right? Every legal system in existence assigns different levels of culpability and guilt and takes intent into account and treats people and their crimes very differently. Intent is nearly always the core of what it means to be criminally liable.
On a moral level, you’ve also argued yourself into a weird place. Assigning equal equivalence to the United States and Imperial Japan (it’s always Japan and never the Germans in these comparisons) should give anyone with a sense of scale and history pause. The IJA and its crimes were so vast and so traumatizing it’s difficult to explain here. It’s 2023 and we celebrated a trilateral summit between the U.S. and its two most important Pacific partners (ROK and Japan), both wealthy democracies with basically no competing geopolitical interests. Why was it such a big deal to get them in the same room? Because of what the IJA did to Koreans during WWII, that the United States stopped. It absolutely makes a difference why someone is doing the bombing, and it makes a difference whether the atrocity is the goal or if it was a crime committed as part of a defensive war, or if it was a mistake in targeting (back to intent).
Not to mention you’ve also argued yourself into “perfect equivalence” between the 8th Air Force and the Wehrmacht and even SS. To quote you:
I shouldn’t need to point out that Nazi Germany killed very few American and proportionally few UK civilians while we killed a great deal many German civilians both in air and ground combat. That’s what it meant to lose a war, and there were very grave outcomes at stake.
You go on to say that it matters little whether a child is killed in an air raid or raped to death. Was it morally equivalent whether a German child died in an air raid as when a Jewish child was stuffed in a gas chamber or shot in a ravine in western Ukraine? Those deaths can—and should— be weighed extremely differently and the armed forces that caused them are in no way and you know that very well.