If its a numbers game I'd be interested to see how many people have died through direct action from the US in recent times. Including troops killed in action.
Me thinks its more than 3000.
Casualties of the Iraq War
Its not the same thing. Not to diminish the casualties of US action, especially those of the Iraq war, which were totally unnecessary.
However, OBL and his followers deliberately attacked civilians. Civilians, it should be noted, that, at least on 9/11 hadn't the slightest idea that they were about to be attacked. There was no military objective to the attack on the Twin Towers (there arguably was with the Pentagon). They simply wanted to kill people. And they would do it again, and again, as they'd done it before, when they blew up holy sites and markets in Iraq and Afghanistan.
At our worst, even in Iraq, we were never deliberately trying to kill innocent people. We were at times careless, which is inexcusable, and some of our people committed terrible crimes, but that was not our policy. That's not to excuse the deaths and suffering we caused, only to point out that the deaths caused by our actions are the result of war (not to mention how many of the innocent people in Iraq (and Afghanistan) were killed by insurgents and terrorists . . . not by us). The Iraq war was a terrible, terrible mistake, and a violation of international law. But we never attacked thousands of people we knew to be civilians out of sheer malice. We never found a building full of innocent people, and said, "Lets blow that up, that'll show them." (and note that had it been later in the day, thousands more would have died in NY).
Let me also point out that OBL has claimed that he attacked us for the express purpose of making us go berserk and dragging us into a war in Afghanistan. Considering that there was no other possible response to 9/11 (there wasn't, not this world), how many of the deaths there should we lay on his head. (Really can't blame him for Iraq. That was all our stupidity).
