And somehow have a magic ball to say what the future brings, and what the alternative future might have been.

This seemingly reasonable argument (assuming that you do not reject violence as fundamentally immorally ) is how Augustine turned a religion of peace into one with soldiers, as Just War theory.

But it doesn't stop. It also twists a phrase like "imminent threat of violent attack" into "does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons will take place in the immediate future" and "enemy militant" into "all military-age males in a strike zone, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent."

The calculus of violence is very coarse, yet you want to hang us all on its balance scales of greater or lesser violence and harm.