Winston Churchill, the architect of the Black and Tans and a war of terror waged against a civilian population in Ireland in the 1920s, was in his own way a charlatan too.
His cabinet agreed to the area bombing of German cities as early as 1942. The only factors at that time preventing raids as effective as the one on Dresden by British and American bombers were technical difficulties -- lack of planes and navigational problems for night bombing. The will was always there and despite objections and division in the military on practical and moral grounds the policy was carried out to the end. In 1942 Cologne was attacked by a Thousand Bomber raid. The huge number of planes in the massive raids envisioned by Harris was designed to overwhelm German air raid defences and allow unhindered comprehensive destruction of cities and rail and industrial targets. After Cologne came Hamburg, and after that Berlin suffered a series of massive raids with high British casualties, and Nuremberg, a symbolic and industrial target that also resulted in high attrition for the RAF. The cabinet including Churchill decided to keep on informing the British public that the object of the raids was military targets.
Harris was promoted to Air Marshall in 1944. To me this signals a level of comfort on the part of Churchill, the Cabinet and military brass with the area bombing approach he favoured. In the closing stages of the war Churchill accused Eisenhower of being soft on German civilians whom he thought should be terrorised, turned out of their homes and transformed into teeming masses of refugees who would clog roads and block German retreat. Terror was in Churchill's mind a good reason to keep on bombing German cities. The Allies were privy to the reports from Hamburg that were sent to Berlin and encouraged by them. It was only after Allied public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic had expressed disgust at the destruction of Dresden that Churchill began to change his tune on area bombing. The RAF and Harris in particular carried Churchill's can. The Russians carried the USAF's can -- General George Marshall claimed the bombing had bee requested by the Russians..
Other reasons to area bomb that had kept its few critics silent were:
The area bombing of German cities was interspersed with raids on the Ruhr that sought to end German synthetic oil production, plus bombing of cities necessarily disrupted western German rail hubs, which had an impact on potential troop deployment or defence against Allied troops on the ground.
Cities in a state of partial or complete destruction were also less likely to become traps for advancing American and British troops. It was a tossup as to which army would arrive in Dresden first, the Soviets or the American Third Army. Either way, preventing a defence of any city as staunch as that encountered over the winter at Breslau was desirable, and the possibility of retreating Germans holing up in Leipzig, Chemnitz or Dresden was one Churchill wanted to avoid and he ordered the destruction of all three. In the runup to the Yalta conference and with the USSR resuming operations all along the front, an impressive attack of tremendous fire power right at the Red Army's doorstep on the Elbe was also considered politically expedient for the sake of USSR-Allied relations.
As well as that, as long as German anti aircraft guns, Luftwaffe planes and flyers and military personnel were tied up fighting off RAF and USAF bombing raids they could not be deployed to the east or against American and British troops in the west or in Italy -- Dresden was considered such an unlikely target by the Germans that its flak batteries had been removed to the east. The continued bombing of German cities was important because the war had become a zero sum game of war materiel availability and production capacity where every gun counted on the German side, and also because president Roosevelt had dictated to the Allies at Casablanca that nothing short of unconditional surrender would be acceptable in either the European or the Pacific theatres, and right up to the end neither Germany nor Japan gave any indication that they intended to surrender.
(It has been argued that the seeking of unconditional surrender by itself stiffened resistance in Germany and led to the prolonging of war longer than it might otherwise have gone on as the German military received no signal from the Allies that they could hope for terms they could agree to. Germany was left with much to fight for therefore.)
Moving on to today, the risk-averse military establishment of Britain and America continues to depend on aerial attack, missiles, drones and other long distance means of war in order to maintain popular support for winnable wars that will not put lives at risk. This was one of the main reasons for the development by the Allies of air forces possessing overwhelming superiority, and also one of the reasons put forth for the dropping of the Bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The various conventions on civilian safety, etc., have been completely disregarded in the quest to keep on winning wars without risking lives and thus keep post WW2 aggressive American foreign policy popular.
The Korean conflict was only just acceptable to the American public the appearance of winning helped but the Vietnamese War like no other convinced the American establishment that the only way to conduct war was from a distance, preferably by proxy (an approach visible today in Ukraine, an arena very popular with neo-cons), maximising use of technology (drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan), and by covert means (deposing and replacing regimes and rulers considered unfriendly, by use of the CIA -- Iran, Panama, etc. etc., and also covert training and equipping of military juntas in Central America, death squads, etc).