Merci for the good intentions, but I was really going to be strongly ironic against some peculiar moods.
The main elements of my opionions are:
a) war is hell (Gen. Sherman, USA, 1864)
b) at war there are not the goods on one side and the evil on the other one. At best there are different mix on each side of the river.
c) To state, at the end of a war, "We were right and gfood, you were the bastards first and last" is an habit against common sense, good taste and history.
d) There are acts, at war, which may be considered correct and other not. To bomb the formes ally or siking and seizinf his ships without a declaration of war is against any rule and who is giulty for such an act may be hanged (it happened, after 1945, to the German general responsable for the killings at Chephalonia; this same fate was spared to Adm. Somerville; the legal and moral situation of both of them was the same: they obeyed at the orders of their politcal bosses. The only difference was one won and the other not, too few to justify anything).
To drop bombs on neutrals is a similar offence. Try to justify such an act saying: they were sorry, they paid for damages, they were monitorig those dirty Swiss ect. is not a justification, is only the confirmation we are in front of someone who is simply believing to have any right and the other ones, emeny or neutral, not. I can understand such a declarartion by a British (Do you remember what Gen. French sted in 1914 when someone told him the British Expeditionay Force was too much far from the first line? " The less the wops on each side the better for us". An Anglosaxon mentality can, by his traditional and historical culture, consider quietely human beings from the Continent (French, German, Italians, Spaniards, Russians ect.) a sort of disgusting second class people, but a French who is trying desperately to support such a point of view in the absurd hope to be considered someway "different" from his unobteinalble model of a gentlemen, not. He is only a toad.
e) The only compass at war is the defense of the national interest. The French who tried to defend their homes, food and trade from the German and Italian invasion were right. The French who did the same facing the British menace the same.
The only way to discriminate among them (and it's quite a difficoult exercise indeed) is to be able to establish who acted fairly and who not. But is history such an enterprise or it's politics? Personally I prefer history first and last.
Greetings
EC
PS I don't know the French words for trigger happy, but if you consider the whle history of air power since H.G. Wells novel The war in the air (1909) you will discover that the (absurd) dream of the bigger and bigger bombs able to win the wars alone without the sale besogne of infantry, fascinated always the Anglosaxon mentality. What strange? Today is not different.