> I'm not even going to get into the "war for oil" conspiracies.

The only reason the middle east is relevant whatsoever in US politics and world affairs is because of the large concentration of petroleum beneath the sand. Once oil loses relevance the middle east will essentially cease to exist as we know it.

Middle Eastern life has been dramatically influenced by Western intervention for generations, so it's hard to imagine what it would be like if allowed to settle into a stable state. Pan Arab movements are a force of progress in the sense that they create a solidarity movement that is less vulnerable to manipulation on the basis of ancient ethnic and religious distinctions.

> The Iraq war was a mistake, but if we did it for oil then we did a really shitty job.

We wanted to control Iraq, the most important land mass in the middle east, both to project power throughout the middle east and to prevent Russia from taking it. At the time of the invasion, Russian and German firms had extensive oil extraction and refinement contracts with Saddam's government, but the Bush administration redistributed the spoils to US and coalition firms.

Don't tell me you think the US invaded Iraq for terrorism related reasons. At the time of the first US invasion (GW1) the US had normal diplomatic channels with Iraq and the US ambassador didn't think the US would care if Saddam annexed Kuwait. The US allowed diplomatic relations to degrade simply because doing so made selling the war easier. But no serious person would think that Saddam would step down just because GWB demanded it in a blustery (and humiliating to the US) speech.

> the intentional, total destruction of a particular ethnic group or nationality

This was done to Baath party members in Iraq, who mostly happened to be Sunni muslims. The US looked the other way after the forces we armed decided to do it. Sunni are a minority in Iraq.

> We were not trying to wipe out all Germans, all Italians, or all Japanese.

I have not argued otherwise. I focused my comments on WW2 to war crimes.

The US has created conditions in many countries that have led to tremendous loss of life of fighting age people. This may not technically be genocide, but the distinction doesn't really matter.

We go in and destroy infrastructure and create a cesspool in which we arm and pay people to kill each other. It's a sick way to thin a population, and we have all sorts of justifications and silly terms for aspects of it, but it is abhorrent.

As we should have learned over the past few decades, nation building rhetoric and "regime change" rhetoric is nonsense. We destroy infrastructure and then blame the victims when they don't all turn out to be Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, or when they or their injured or grieving family members are less enthusiastic about more suffering after the US-funded regime change effort leaves them in chaos.

It's not just stupid and ineffective foreign policy, it's morally abhorrent conduct that has cost the US significant respect around the world, and (quite ironically) created a reality distortion in the minds of many Americans where American actions are considered somehow appropriate or normal. It's reminiscent of the sort of absurd beliefs posited to N Koreans.