[the phantom]

Sauron isn't just some dude that The Aragorn Gang is trying to bushwhack for bragging rights, or a bounty, or because of some personal grudge.

And when did I say that Wyatt Earp was just some dude concerned with bragging rights? In order to compare the two situations, you assume that Wyatt Earp is a very bad (as in Sauron-bad) guy.

Yes, Sauron was a particularly special case, which is why I said "If Gondor was fighting Harad then Aragorn would be expected to keep his sword away from the messenger’s neck, but when you're dealing with Sauron- almost anything goes."

Say Wyatt Earp rides out to your ranch (unprovoked, of course) with a posse of cut-throats and bushwhackers, sets your house on fire, kicks your dog, steals your wife, and tells you he's gonna raise your kids to be his horse-stall muckers just as soon as he kills you, and then you're starting to get into an analogy that isn't absurd.

I was basically assuming that Earp was the type of guy you've just described. Were other people not assuming that? After all, I'm trying to compare him to Sauron.

There's a big difference between the ambush of an individual and a strategy aimed at destroying an aggressive enemy's ability to make war on you.

That's fine, but in this case wasn't Aragorn's ambush of MoS in the interest of "destroying an aggressive enemy's ability to make war"? As I explained in my last post, that act possibly kept Sauron from getting his Ring (which would obviously spell doom for Middle Earth).