Yes, it is. But if we're not prepared to take the risk of military intervention otherwise, we need to be explicit about what will and won't get a reaction out of us--for many reasons. I would say, "Go ahead and kill the terrorists, but killing no more civilians than we would."
"And we know what 'a reasonable number of civilians' looks like. We kill them by accident all the time. But we're not *aiming* at them. We'll know if you're aiming at them. Oh, and at the end of it, Assad has to go. He can go to Moscow, but he's got to go."
If we had any sense at all, we'd say, "We understand your concerns about terrorists. Let us have the honor of killing them. We'll do it more carefully. Then we can let the 2.5 million civilians decide how they want to govern themselves, okay?"
