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Originally Posted by Ronnie Dobbs2
Although it would be interesting to see SD's tactics in a war that is (quasi) universally thought as justified.
Were people up in arms about Dresden/Hiroshima?
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Opinions on Dresden and Hiroshima have been changing over time and demographic. I am not sure on this, but I vaguely believe that general support during the war was high (all that really matters you can argue, because everyone is an armchair general after the war). Probably for most people they simply did not understand what the scope of these actions were or meant.
Also for say England, they had felt the fear of urban bombardment and I'm sure no small amount of 'fair vengeance' public opinion comes into play.
In a fight for all the marbles, public support in my opinion becomes a question of what people think best helps them survive. This is why isolationism was wildly popular in the world wars, people generally hate to get involved in fighting unless they feel they have to.
What we are dealing with is arguably fights to police the world. The stakes are not as high for the public, and on the surface seem like they will never reach a serious threat. Public support for those might be a different beast than Hiroshima... since there is always a feeling of 'do we really need to be here at all?' to combat.
I think if we are reasonably selective of targets (WMD, military hardware being used to kill villagers, large concentrations of equipment, or equipments in aggressive positions towards South Korea) that public support would understand a degree of civilian casualties. Even 'deliberate' ones as I would authorize in the most necessary cases.
At some point the damage gets to a point where NK has trouble maintaining its particular type of control over the populace. In my opinion I'd even foment this as a form of cheap ground warfare (I'm a big fan of taking away the bully's club and seeing how they handle ten times as many angry victims).