MGibson: *In the specific cases I mentioned we have certainly avoided exposing Americans to violence as much as possible. During “Operation Monica” we lobbed a few missiles and didn’t accomplish anything. So yes I’d argue that our aversion to violence has convinced many people that the United States is in fact a paper tiger. *
(Emphasis mine.) Wait a sec here, I think we may be conflating two separate notions with very important differences. To be “averse to exposing Americans to violence” is not the same thing as being “averse to violence”. In fact, the kind of military attacks that are safest for American personnel (like the air strikes in Kosovo and Iraq) tend to be the most indiscriminate with regard to targets, and the most likely to inflict violence unintentionally on non-combatant victims. (In the same vein, the “Operation Monica” bombings did actually accomplish the destruction of a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant that was never actually shown to have any connection to terrorists, but was very important in manufacturing medicines. Once again, that ended up hurting a lot of people we didn’t mean to hurt, which doesn’t make us look good.)
So I still don’t think it’s really justified to describe U.S. policy as “averse to violence”, or that we’re widely perceived as a “paper tiger”. It might be more apt to say that many people perceive us as a “mean but blind tiger”: when someone pulls our tail, we lash out with claws and teeth, but we can’t really tell and don’t very much care whom we get, as long as we get somebody. I think this is exactly how terrorists want us to be perceived, since they can use that in their spiel that we’re all cruel and dangerous oppressors who don’t care whom we hurt as long as we get our own way, so they must launch a holy war against us, blah blah blah. That’s why I think we need to be really, really careful and restrained about the use of violence, because whatever we do that attacks innocent victims (however unintentionally) will in the long run end up creating more terrorists than it kills.