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I think the issue here is considering motivation and mindset. I was just explaining to a friend of mine (a very, "Semper fi! Do or die! Gung ho! Gung ho! Gung ho!"* kind of guy) that what terrorists do is wrong, absolutely. There are no shades of gray about killing civilians. However, if you want terrorism to stop, or at least slow down, the answer isn't the threat of retaliatory action. These people aren't afraid to die, hell, the Muslims look forward to it. What will stop them is getting into the mindset of your average terrorist, figuring out their motivation and taking that away. If you enter into a spiral where each side is thinking, "Well, we'll kill them because they killed us," the killing will never stop. However, if you genuinely work toward the resolution of a problem (say, Chechen independence or us getting the fuck out of the middle east, for example), you can stop the hatred. It won't be an instantaneous swords-to-plowshares transformation, but it will happen. The vast majority of terrorists are fighting because they've lost a family member or a close friend or a home or a life in the war that they are now participating in. If we stop killing mothers, their sons will stop turning into terrorists.
*The first person to tell me what movie this line is from gets a gold star for the day.
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The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
---Friedrich Nietzsche
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