Reply #63: Well, she speaks for me

[primavera]

As far as I'm aware, leesa never claimed that today's terrorist attacks were laudable, but rather that we shouldn't be too surprised to see this sort of stuff happen given the example we're setting for the world. And I agree entirely. It is staggeringly hypocritical to present ourselves as some sort of defender of liberty and justice against evil terrorists while we're torturing people to death in our gulags, cruise-missiling apartment buildings, and massacring civilians at a rate terrorists can't even begin to match.

And leesa's numbers are not inflated, at least not according to the study conducted by Johns Hopkins and Columbia (both highly credible institutions, I think you'd agree) in October 2004 which found that at least 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths were attributable to our invasion of Iraq, and that was nine months ago, who knows what it's up to now? And, as I believe others have mentioned, Iraq Body Count only counts reported deaths, which, by their own admission, represents but a sliver of the true death count. So ease up on the allegations of number inflation - Johns Hopkins and Columbia may be wrong, but leesa's got a perfectly respectable source for her figures.

Again, none of that excuses the terrorists, but one does reap what one sews, and so long as we consider ever escalating violence to be the sole response to terrorism, they in turn will respond in kind. That really shouldn't surprise anyone.