Moral justification for the execution of criminals of war?

[The Grand Nudger]

You've made a lot of assertions, but you've provided no real rational argument to support them.  Why, exactly, is it better to spare a brutal criminal than to execute him?  Is it possible that your position is an emotional one?  If so, why are your emotional positions more valid than someone's else.  If not, then what non-emotional position do you take?

In a society that holds to a no killing rule, you don't have to "spare" a killer to hold to your no killing rule, just not kill them.  The reason it's considered to be better not to kill that killer is because it's one less violation of the same rule they broke.  

People may also feel a certain way about it.  They may desperately want to kill that person.  Unfortunately, the "no killing" rule doesn't state "unless you really wanna"...and so, while a person may understand that it's a good rule for society..they also understand they may find themselves personally unsatisfied by it.    

This isn't difficult to understand. You may disagree...but I don't think that you disagree for any of the doomed objections made thusfar, and your insistence that any possible decision to do x must be emotional is projection on it's face. As I said before, it's your complete intolerance for any other explanation that's lead you down this silly path. Personally..laying aside any rule whatsoever about killing, I don't want to live in a society where the set of justifiable things is determined by people's emotional response to tragedy. Sounds like a recipe for a pile of burnt out hovels, not a functional society. You could come up with a bajillion examples of The West™ doing some thing x for that reason in criticism...and each one will powerfully argue for my position on that matter.