>I think that "genocide" is one of the most over-used
> words there is. In practice nowadays it seems to mean
> any conflict in which large numbers of noncombatants
> are killed. Vietnam was genocide, Chechnya was
> genocide, Kosovo was genocide etc. There's a genocide
> under every rock. Look, most armed conflicts in the
> modern world are counter-insurgency vs. guerilla
> warfare. Civilian bodycounts in such situations--and
> I'm not sure how to rigidly define "civilian"
> here--are invariably horrifically high. That does not
> make them attempted genocides.
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The 1948 International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide defined the act as "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such".
Charles and others neglect the crucial qualifier "as such".
Someone might want to argue that Bush and Clinton were determined to destroy Iraqi nationals at least "in part" - that part being Saddam Hussein and the apparatus which maintained he and the Baath party in power, but that the other Iraqi deaths were unintentional "collateral damage".
But even this would be wrong. The Baathists were destroyed for political reasons, not national or ethnic ones, not as Iraqi nationals "as such", but as Iraqi opponents of US Mideast policy.
Without dscounting the horrific atrocities, the same is true of the alleged "genocides" in Kosova, Vietnam, Chechnya, etc., as Chris rightly points out. These were brutal military operations designed to crush resistance infrastructures integrated with the civilian populations by any means necessary.
In Rwanda, Tutsi men, women, and children were rounded up and murdered "as such". Same as the Judeocide. In each case, there was no significant resistance infrastructure in place when the systematic massacres of the entire population occured. If there had been such, the mass exterminations would likely have been averted although there would still have been widespread death and destruction in these communities . .