Americans chose their government like japan or germany or Canada or any other democracy.
Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany were not democracies in 1939-1945. Moderate leaders were murdered by the military hawks in Japan and the Nazis in Germany. Anyone who opposed them in their own countries were ground under. Yet most of the population in both countries at first applauded the gangsters who took over their governments. And what Japan did in China and Korea and Germany in Poland and France were not against the will of the Japanese and Germans who accepted the idea they were superior to other people on the globe. As a result, it's hard to find any true innocents in those countries during the war years.
The civilians that got annihilated by the second atomic bomb dropped, had as much influence on their Countries military decisions as the rank and file joe and jane six-pack.
Actually they had less influence, being ruled by the military and an emperor than did the average citizens in the democracies of the US and Canada.
But the atom bombs were not dropped on the two Japanese cities because of the influence the citizens had or didn't have. It was done to break Japan's will to resist, and by that I mean the will of both the Japanese people and the Japanese government. That's a principle that goes back to Sherman and his march through Georgia. Sherman wasn't aiming at the Confederate armies in that campaign; he set out to destroy anything that in any way supported those armies, including crops, farm implements, livestock, horses, wagons, railroads, rolling stock, factories that made anything that a Confederate soldier might find useful or that would sustain him in the field. They even shot dogs because Southerners used dogs to track runaway slaves and escaped POWs.
When it came to the bombing campaigns of World War II, there were slave laborers from countries occupied by Germany in those factories that the US Air Force targeted for precision bombing. Japan used Allied POWs in their mines and factories and they too died under Allied bombs. There were captured US air crews vaporized by the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. But both cities had military manufacturing going on in their limits, and those factories and other facilities to support the war also were staffed by Japanese civilians who lived in houses near the factories. So those houses and those people were legitimate targets, just like all of Houston would be if we get into a war with some country with intercontinental missiles. It's hard, but that's what war is all about. There are no neat little boundaries separating soldiers from civilians--it's all one big target. That's just the cold, hard truth.
America is not sacred ground.
Personally, I consider America to extend from the Straits of Magellan through Canada and Alaska. I'm an American who happens to live in the US--the best part of it, in fact, Texas. No, it's not sacred, and I don't say that simply because I'm not religious. We've been invaded before--by British and Canadian troops from Canada. The Royal Marines and the Black Watch burned our capitol almost to the ground until a huge storm (a large tornado, some say) put out the fires and badly injured the British forces -- our own "divine wind," you might say. So we have taken our lumps before and may again. But before you get too tickled about that prospect, make sure you're not downwind from the fallout, cause if we catch cold, you're likely to develop pneumonia.
oh and Iraq was about oil lets not be naive.
Then ain't it interesting that Iraq was producing more oil before the invasion that it is today, although the UN was supposedly limiting its sale under the international sanctions with the oil income supposedly to be used only to buy food and medicine for the Iraqi population. Iraq still hasn't brought its production up to its previous levels and little if any of it comes to the US. Most goes to Japan who didn't participate in the war. The biggest US sources of imported oil are Canada, Saudi Arabia, and Mexico. The Saudis have part interest in some major US refineries, so they make sure their investment maintains a good supply of crude. Venezuela used to be a major source, but President Hugo Chavez's regime has lost production and investors through its actions. Iraq has not been a substantial source of crude for the US since well before Iraq invaded Kuwait. At that time, the US got oil from Iraq while Japan got oil from Kuwait, yet we and our allies (including England, maybe even Canada for all I know) went in to kick out Saddam and liberate Kuwait. Goes to show how "concerned" we were about Iraq's oil.