If you want to make flippant statements, perhaps you should find or research an infographic like: "Civilian deaths due to extremist groups vs. civilian deaths due to US military actions and sanctions".

Feel free to ignore the far longer history of one side, and the fact one side gave weapons and stupid quantities of free media airtime to the other.

If you recall, Wikileaks' war logs proved once and for all the real quantity of civilian deaths is a lot higher than you hear reported in the media by outing the US military's internally reported stats.

More people probably died in the first two months of the year in multiple African conflicts than civilian deaths attributable to terrorism in the last 10 years.

PS. Funny how as soon as I post this reply I get downvoted on both comments. American nationalism is alive and kicking on HN :)

http://www.wikileaks.org/ http://www.globalissues.org/article/105/effects-of-sanctions http://iraqwar.org/mass_destruction.htm https://chomsky.info/200401__/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_documents_leak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_war... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_US_dr... http://tech.mit.edu/V128/N63/chomskytalk.html http://www.countercurrents.org/lucas240407.htm https://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflict...