Our president may have tried to make a link between 9/11 and Iraq but it never realy panned out for him. We went in there because of false intelligence on WMD's. Even so, war with an enemy is not the Same as ethnic cleansing.

If you really believe that it is, you are only downplaying the actions of people like Hitler and Sadam who rounded up non-combatants to deliberately murder them all. That is what genocide is, plain and simple.

Calling it genocide may make you feel riteous, but it dosn't make it true.
The US does not have any puppet governments. Our worst transgressions in this regard in the past were setting up leaders who liked us (Iran). They were still completely independent governments, not puppets. We wont have a puppet government in Iraq either and they may or may not like us. The Iraq invasion will cost us billions.. and in the end we will be able to buy the oil we were already buying.

If you knew anything about recent history, you would know that Sadam invaded and occupied Kuwait. The US drove him back out. But I guess in your eyes we destroyed Kuwait for their oil?

War for oil.. it makes a trendy bumper sticker or campaign slogan but thats about it.

Well he can afford not to be speechless because he does not live in fascist U SS A Disneyland. Or probably you feel sorry for not reeducating him in Guantanamo Bay.

Umm - I think it was a little worse than just setting up leaders who 'liked' you.

these people were often guilty of crimes against their own people. and it is this history that has been coming back to bite you over the last few decades.

well what was the war for? it sure as hell wasn't to liberate the Iraqis, and the WMD's were known to be a fabrication.

The only thing you mention here that might qualify is the decimation of Native American populations. No one will tell you that "Manifest Destiny" was a pretty thing.

The blacks don't qualify because the aim of slavery (while utterly despicable) was not to wipe out the blacks.

The Vietnamese don't qualify because the aim of that war was not to wipe out Vietnamese (just to make them all capitalists).

The Iraqis don't qualify because the aim is not to wipe out Iraqis (we're 'liberating' them).

A genocide is a concerted effort to remove a nationality/ethnicity/religion from the face of the Earth.

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

And with regard to the American Indian there were high level personnel and factions of the government that vehemently opposed actions that would "wipe them out." The politicians merely fell into the "ignorance" mode, turning their backs on information that did not fit into their agenda. If Indians died then that was the way it was left to stand.

DO NOT get me wrong. There was a concentrated military effort and localized governmental effort to destroy whole tribes of Indians and a belief empowered by fear that kept their efforts in the support of the general population.

At the same time there was huge dissent in federal government at the way they were being treated.

It is an example of a fledgling government's failed policy whose ultimate goal was to make the continent hospitable to pilgrimage.

It is sad, indeed, but to act as though the USA is still working under the same circumstances using the same methodology is wrong. Genocide is not the goal of the USA and I do not believe for one second that it ever was.

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you're right he only shoots and enslaves his own.

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No individual can plan his own existence in their view.

So the state planners must arrogate to themselves the right to manipulate any sector of the economic system if the good of “society” or the “general welfare” is paramount.

Ipso- if the rights of the individual get in the way, the rights of the individual must be sublimated.

The Road to Serfdom
FA Hayek (interpretation)

Yup. Which is worse...a country that chooses allies and goes to great lengths to protect them, even at the costs of war...

or a murderous dictator who destroys and imprisons his own people for daring to dissent?

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My only point is that they were not puppets. If they were puppets we would pull strings and not let them do terrible things. Heck we wouldn’t bother buying the oil if they were our puppets, they would just give it to us. If he said we propped up dictators or interfered with a Democratic process in Iran I would agree. But as he has with other things like equating war to genocide, he exaggerated our transgressions to the level of colonial domination to garner support and evoke outrage

The WMD intelligence being false was not discovered until after the fact. Sadam’s interference with weapons inspections only seemed to confirm that he was hiding something. We were wrong.

A war for oil makes absolutely 0 sense from an economic or availability of resources standpoint. You can’t connect the dots between Iraq has oil, the US is at war with Iraq, Bush comes from an oil production family and then conclude the war was for oil. Without the necessary evidence in-between the theory is purely gossip and speculation. It is a HUGE jump in logic.

It was a police car chasing a suspected criminal (Thomas) and he was on bicycle, through sydney. While fleeing he hit a gutter and flew into a fence, impaling himself. The whole country was very sad about this, and of course noone went out and impaled him.

you wish. the evidence is that western leaders (certainly not exclusively the US) has turned a blind eye to many a human rights abuse when it suits them.

well, I disagree. there was plenty of evidence that was ignored long before the war, again, because certain leaders preferred to believe what they wanted to believe.

I have no doubt that oil was part of it, however it is unlikely to have been the only thing. there was also the possibility of strategic benefits had the war gone the way they imagined it would.

the truth was, your guys (and others) were stupid. ANYONE who had even a basic knowledge of the region predicted it would be an unmitigated disaster, with the likelihood of a civil war developing.

The irony is that Iranian style Shi'a are playing a significant role int he direction of the new Iraq, AQ type fighters have expanded their operation into Iraq, and the Iraq war has virtually guaranteed that other 'axis of evil' countries will be hell bent on getting nuclear weapons ... because they don't want to suffer the same fate as Iraq.

Ah, but they are plenty of people here in the states that spew the same foolishness, I have met several in real life and seen far more in public life.

They sometimes talk about how brave they are, while living the life afforded to them by the capitalistic nation they hate.