"I dont care if any Iraqis are killed in that big ol' bug zapper.
So long as I'm safe, I'm happy."

Is there anything wrong with wanting to be safe and happy?
Did America "deserve" to have terrorists kill 3000 of it's citizens?

Do the Iraq people have any responsiblity? Sure, they are victims but in utmost degree they are the soveriegn power that allowed their "strongman" to rule them.
Now, what we wanted was to was remove Saddam from power without even firing a shot. But we had these fucking Frenchmen who had this ego problem- and thinking they needed to "balance world power"- missing the time of when the Soviets were doing this. So we had to use our miltary, because France, in a way, was "calling our bluff". Fine, whatever, go to plan "B". Plan B was to defeat Saddam's miltary. In a sense, Saddam's miltary was so incompetent, they couldn't manage what other most other miltary are capable of doing- surrendering so as to protect their citizens from a worse effects of war. Did they actually think the US and coalition were going to eat their children? No, they knew why we were there- to liberate the country from their idiot dictator.
So, it could have been possible for invasion to be relatively painless, we didn't need Iraq to become the "big ol' bug zapper", but you could say in general we wanted to redirect terrorist attention- maybe make them change their tactics.

"Still trying to square this with your recent conversion to compassion for the Iraqi people. "

We could have done a UN type operation- spare our troops and mostly let the Iraqis fight it out. Or just focus on the Southern region- take the port region, cut off rest of country. Take the north too and squeeze the middle. This would mean more Iraqis getting killed- and there was also the unknown factor of Saddam using chemical weapons- and not just against our troops. Chemical weapons work better in a static type war than against a moblized one.
But as it is, the war despite the terrorists actions has been relatively painless for Iraqi.