I actually think there are larger forces at play.
Reality is there's a balancing act to have people do the "dude obey" at home and have a cohesive society, all the while supporting actions around the world. The sense of decency in our society means we cannot tolerate our army looting and pillaging in a medieval or Red Army fashion the innocent people across the globe. Generally people are self-absorbed so anti-war sentiment goes up when our nose gets bloodied, but we see civil disobedience with Vietnam etc.
So where we can, we typically try to do others to do our dirty work for us, and to wash our hands. So deporting people to foreign countries for torture etc, or supporting puppet regimes and satellite states.
Of course, a guy like Chomsky sees right through that.
Then me personally, I take great offense that military personnel are not held to have a right to life that an ordinary citizen does. I would argue that the supreme crime is that of unethical aggression. Hence, unwarranted precision military strikes against militaries in other nations I would consider to be as terroristic in nature as any other type attack.
I mean, if we blew up a central american military base simply because we wanted to, I personally do not differentiate that to just blowing up any random person. Doing such a thing is largely unpallatable, so instead low level interference is usually conducted to destablize a government, have them do something out of line, and then move in and say we are "liberating" people.
Anyhow, I digress, it's a view and nuance that is seldomly shared, but for me personally, when something happens like a few dozen middle easterners attack civilization, it doesn't give us a right to concoct a story of WMDs and us invading a problematic separate country in Iraq because "we can't have the proof in the form of the mushroom cloud" and wage a war of aggression on a FALSE pretense of defense and that not be considered terrorism.
So there's an argument to be made that all that military action taken was countless acts of terrorism. Of course, people on this side of the pond who have the benefit of having the biggest army, a lifetime of patriotic indoctrination, and an ability to redefine the word "terrorism" from what it says it is in my dictionary, will seldom view it like that.
