I entirely agree with you about what a calamity the war on terror has been (heres a comment I wrote a while back suggesting that the negative impact of the WoT might be about as big in magnitude as the positive impact of the tech revolution).

I was just observing that there is a meaningful statistical difference between the two types of events and therefore it isn't wildly irrational to be more concerned with one type than the other, even if a naive expected loss calculation suggests the opposite.