I was in Europe on September 11, 2001. I turned on the TV after a busy day and at first thought it was showing a disaster movie, until I changed the channel and found the same thing.

More people died in bathtubs that year than on September 11th. If they wanted to save lives, we'd have a war on bathtubs, not a war on terrorism.

This is not correct. 1/10th as many people died in bathtubs, although a similar number died in all drowning accidents (some of which are the result of heart attacks or other incapacity suffered while in the water, making the exact cause of death hard to establish): http://danger.mongabay.com/injury_death.htm Of course, we don't have to look far to find things that are more deadly than terrorism in the aggregate - motor vehicle accidents, for example, do kill a lot more people than terrorism does.

But what your argument fails to address is that accidental deaths are highly distributed and largely uncorrelated while terrorist activity is concentrated and systematic. The qualitative differences are huge, just as there's a huge difference between being hit by a pound of sand (not painful unless some of it gets in your eyes or you inhale it) and being hit by a rock of the same weight (painful and with much greater potential to be fatal). As well as the immediate economic and personal losses, catastrophic events also tend to set big changes in motion. It's highly questionable, for example, whether we would have invaded Iraq absent 9-11 and it's equally unlikely that we would have invaded Afghanistan.

Of course that doesn't mean we should organize everything around the very low probability of terrorist attack or any other concentrated risk factor, but to ignore the multiplier effects of concentration is also facile.