What you wrote here has merit, but it is strongly implicative of an equality between opponents. In Judo, are black belt masters expected to pummel their inferiors into submission in competition; sort of like the Conan definition of happiness:
"to defeat my enemy;
to see him vanquished before me;
to hear the lamentation of the women";
or are they expected to take into consideration relative fighting abilities and adjust their reactions accordingly?
In sport judo, definitely. For example, below brown or black belt level, when you throw an opponent, you are required to position his landing such that he can best use the standard techniques of breaking the fall.
In street fighting or in military operations, especially if you don't have a knowledge of the armament or capability of the opponent(s), until you have reasonable certainty that he is unable to harm you, the fighter pilot motto is "always honor the threat". That other aircraft is no longer a threat when it either crashes into the ground, or you have capabilities that reliably let you evade him.
In a knife fight, if your opponent on the ground is packing a swiss army key chain knife, and yours is a straight outta Rambo variety, maybe you shouldn't go over and kick the living hell out of him.
He picked that situation. As long as he's conscious, has the knife, and I don't know if he also has a gun to shoot me in the back if I move away, I won't kick him simply to inflict pain. I will, however, kick him to render him unconscious, or unable to use his arms.
Real-world example from H.R. McMaster, in 1991: in the Battle of 73 Easting, his reinforced company ran into an Iraqi tank brigade, and they didn't stop attacking until every enemy vehicle was burning. A little while later, his unit ran into some Republican Guards clearly digging in for a fight to the death, but he didn't back off and call in air strikes. Instead, he called for an interpreter and loudspeaker team, and talked them into surrender at no cost to either side.
At 73 Easting, he didn't know the precise strength of the enemy force, and a large part of his advantage was momentum. Real-world conflict means people are going to die that might have surrendered, but a commander has the first responsibility to his own men. A very large proportion of fighters shot down by other fighters never saw their opponent.
Saddam was an evil murderous bastard, but he was not insane. It raised his hackles, but he was clearly controllable with leash and collar. He was not a mad dog. You certainly cannot be one who believes that Iraqis as a whole are better off today than they were under Saddam's thumb. As the death toll attributed to This War Upon Iraq as risen and now probably exceeds Saddam's butchery factored at an annualised rate, and the data became public regarding the Bremer controlled CPA's unaccounted for $8+ billion in just over a year, the arguments attempting to justify the War based upon Saddam's killing fields and Oil for Food conniving have become increasingly bitter fruit to swallow. They are just more revisionary fabrications proffered by the administration of mediocrity.
I have never supported the second attack on Iraq. Fundamentally, it made no sense. Even if Saddam was supportive of terrorists, the terrorist threat to the United States is overhyped. Realistically, more Americans die from junk food than bombs. Saddam did play brinksmanship about having WMD, but those were his crown jewels -- what reason would the secular Saddam have to hand them over to religious terrorists? There would be a higher probability that he could hurt Israel than the US, simply due to distance, but he'd have to avoid the resulting mushroom clouds.
