What they want is to provoke a response, ideally heavy-handed repression sounds damage maximizing to me - provoking a heavy handed response sounds like an issu

What they want is to provoke a response, ideally heavy-handed repression sounds damage maximizing to me - provoking a heavy handed response sounds like an issue of damage multiplication. It's not as if all targets are equally valid to terrorists - no one ever suicide bombed a corn field in Nebraska. If the 9/11 hijackers were going for maximum damage, what should they have attacked? Drone strikes and the policy of global assassination does not keep you safe, it just kills a lot of people It keeps me more safe than doing nothing, and less safe than other more dramatic attacks - e.g glassing the countries that produce the most terrorists. I'm sure my local police could keep me more safe, but that doesn't discredit the safety they help create. Re support for democracy, I'm not sure why you believe that given support for Pinochet, sisi, Mubarak, hussein, Saud etc America supports non-democratically elected leaders in addition to democratically elected leaders. I don't have a list, but I think the only democratically elected government that the US doesn't support is Hamas.