It's interesting how people insist on making exceptions. Different people make different exceptions.

I suppose the rarelamb position, in which anything is justified if the aim is to achieve a good end, is logical. It is the one which terrorists of all varieties rely on.

"If this means that terror by way of bombing will shorten the war then by all means bomb away." Bin Laden couldn't put it better. (Though surely the aim isn't to shorten the war, it's to win it. After all, it'd be the easiest thing in the world to shorten a war if that consideration did not have to be taken into account.)