My understanding was that Dresden (on the American end at least) was a tran-plan target - the railyards. IIRC there was originally intelligence indicating a panzer division scheduled to be shipped through when the bombing raid was planned. Later intelligence indicated there would be no panzer division but neither the Americans nor the British saw fit to cancel their raids.
I don’t think that the US should apologize for the dropping of the atomic bombs. I do feel that dropping the atomic bomb ended up being the “best” option for both the US and Japan. (Though I just read Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan, by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, which looks at the last months of the year from Japanese, American, and Soviet points of view and raises some interesting questions about some of the motivations and choices of the key decision makers on all sides http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0674016939/qid=1127830848/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-4086655-5550436?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 )
I still don’t think that it was a win-win solution for Japan.