You can acheive peace without killing; wars can be fought in a way that's less destructive.

"Can" acheive peace without killing, sometimes; the question being when force is necessary and when it isn't.

Compared to most wars in history, I don't think can say that the ones we put on in Iraq and Afghanistan were overly destructive. We have missiles that can hit specific buildings. We spend millions if not billions of dollars to do nothing but avoid killing people unnecessarily, and avoid having even ONE of our troops killed if it's possible to avoid it. All wars are bloody, and all wars end up killing innocent people. Sometimes doing nothing also ends up killing innocent people; what are you going to do? Sometimes there is no way to win. Blame Saddam for being evil and causing the situation in the first place. Yes, Saddam caused the situation. If Iraq wasn't run by a psychopath, then NONE of this would've happened. People seem to forget that. People blame Bush, because he solved a problem in a way that wasn't optimal in their own eyes; people don't blame the person who caused the problem to begin with.

Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have hurtled two countries back several decades...

Yeah, we took away their military police and public torture-executions of innocent people, and gave them all those nasty "human rights". And the millions of dollars we're pouring into their countries to rebuild the infrastructure which was likely barely in existence to begin with, and the effort to have foreign nations cancel Iraq's debts, etc. etc., I guess that doesn't matter either. And those democratic elections we're trying to set up, which they never had before in those countries, those are steps backwards, right?

If America was "evil", and if Bush's philosophy was to "kill everyone who potentially poses a threat", why didn't we carpet-bomb Baghdad into a sandlot and leave? That would've solved our problem instantly. It would've prevented US casualties. It would've saved us millions of dollars. Our allies would hate us, but hey, they already do. It likely would've scared other countries into not messing with us, or else we'd do the same to them. So why didn't we do it? Maybe because we AREN'T an evil empire of death run by a blood-drinking monster, as people seem to imagine.