ourselves and our interests, given the right circumstances.

I bet if you polled our citizenry and asked questions like:

"Would you be ok with bombing a wedding if you were certain that several of the world's most dangerous terrorists, who are in the process of planning out attacks on the US homeland, were present" most would say "yes" or "yes assuming there is no better way."

Likewise, we seemed fine nuking the Japanese and fire-bombing cities full of civilians in our last major war; plenty of us were fine inflicting collateral damage on Vietnamese, Afghan, and Iraqi civilians more recently.

I don't think it's that black and white. War is awful and requires one to do awful things to win.