Yep. The neocons were so blindly devoted to democratic peace theory that they attempted to force the world toward a state of greater peace by starting wars.
Alternate viewpoint: Saddamn Hussein was filling mass graves with his genocide, but the international community was too apathetic to allow an attempt to do so if it would disrupt their economies/oil, and we needed an excuse.
Seriously, he was literally slaughtering people.
To be perfectly honest I believe the death rate is a lot higher now than then. Also, about the time Saddam was really doing that he was doing US bidding in the Iran/Iraq war, and about that time USA blew up a civilian Iranian plane with 290 people on board, that was in Iranian airspace taking off from an airport on a scheduled flight.
Plus Reagan and Latin America, estimates of Reagan-backed regime deaths are in the high 100,000s. For example, 30000 were killed by US trained and backed death squads in El Salvador just in 1983 i believe, and the guy who trained that lot was actually recruited to train counter-insurgency guys in Iraq in 2004, with similar accounts of torture and mass murder resulting. And this is even before we get into things like the Contras, the propping up of Noriega then subsequent invasion etc, and the fact that Bush absolutely loves Colombia despite the fact that their army claimed to have killed 110000 from 2002-2008 (there are only 30000 rebels in the nation). The moral grandstanding doesn't add up. We supported people doing worse things even while the 2003 Iraq War was being carried out.
America still supports Colombia to this day despite the huge scandals involving trade union deaths (some years > 50% of trade unionists murdered are just in Colombia) as well as the "false positives" scandal, where they are prosecuting soldiers over murders of around 2500 people, and those are just the ones they
know about. The lawsuits make up 2.5% of the Army's claimed bodycount for the time period. One example is a UN observer group who uncovered 2000+ bodies in a mass grave next to an army base in Colombia. And these are
recent, i.e. mid 2000s. They said to the government "what the fuck is this?" and all they get back is "evil rebels". The UN observers believe they're actually murdered trade unionists and activists from the local region. If there's one mass grave of 2000 people, and the army got caught murdered 2500 people in another expose, then it's safe to assume there are
dozens more sites like this, and many more murder cases. The 110,000 death toll starts to sound realistic.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-kovalik/us-colombia-cover-up-atro_b_521402.html2000 civilians dumped in a secret mass grave outside a Colombian army base which also houses US advisors.