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1. The confused and messy history of scalping was sorted out most recently in essays by James Axtell, the noted historian and ethnographer from the College of William & Mary. (His books of essays are available from Oxford University Press.) Axtell has shown that, although Native American peoples did practice scalping before the arrival of Europeans, the arrival of Europeans who brought with them iron and steel knives did accelerate the practice.
2. Moreover, Native American practices that Europeans condemned as savagery -- such as torture of captives -- actually had deep roots in the values and culture of the Native American nations. For example, a warrior who was captured and then subjected to torture was expected to prove his bravery and mettle by not showing pain or fear under torture but instead singing his death song with bravery and gallantry. In so doing he would win a reputation after death among his foes for bravery that would also redound to the benefit of his nation.
3. Native American nations often did practice warfare against one another of extraordinary intensity and what we would deem savagery and cruelty -- they needed no lessons from us in that.
4. The United States is NOT the only or the first nation to have used aerial bombardment against civilians, nor the only or first nation to do any of the other things charged against the United States in previous posts -- except for the use of atomic weapons. Yes, we did that one first. And so far we are the only nation to have used nuclear weapons in warfare. Note, however, that the history of nuclear weapons has, as several previous posters have noted, been one in which their mere existence and the knowledge of the devastation they can cause helped to prevent their use in warfare by us or anyone else.
5. As for continual involvement in war warranting the label of savagery, that is again a difficult one. The European nations in the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries were in a state of almost constant warfare with one another -- a point that Jonathan Swift made in the second voyage of GULLIVER'S TRAVELS. And, although supposedly the world was at peace following 1945, actually there has never been a time in the twentieth century when there was not at least one brutal and bitter war going on somewhere in the world, and often more than one at the same time in widely scattered areas of the world.
6. Finally, every people on earth has a prayer for peace and a dream of peace -- and every people on earth has a history of warfare.
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