Rhetoric

"the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, especially the use of figures of speech and other compositional techniques." That's what the dictionary says, anyway. This is how we persuade the peace-loving people of this great nation of ours that the best way to discourage bad behavior is by engaging in that same bad behavior, only on a massive scale. I am speaking, somewhat rhetorically, about airstrikes. 
What sends a better message to our enemies that killing our people, or any people for that matter, than by dropping hundreds of bombs and missiles on strategic targets? This is how we will teach the lesson that killing is wrong. If you behead journalists, if you slaughter defenseless women and children in an effort to further your cause or defeat our own, we will bomb you back to the stone age. We will fill you with shock and awe. We will bring death from above. Don't mess with the US. We've been doing this rhetoric thing now for a couple hundred years. Maybe you've heard of a little ditty we like to call "Live Free Or Die?" That was us. How about "There is nothing to fear but fear itself?" We did that. We liked it so much, we thought about putting it on a dime, but it wouldn't fit under the guy's face so we left it at that. 
The point is: We here in America ('merica) are always willing to set an example of how to behave by doing that exact thing that we have said that we want to discourage. Empire building? No. Not where we are trying to install a democracy. How about terrorism? We will scare the jihad out of you if you give us half a chance. We're that good. 
So what if we happen to take out a few civilians while we're on our way to proving the larger point by blowing up somebody's ammo dump. The ammo dump that was probably at least half-filled with weapons stamped "made in the USA." The ammo dump that happened to be located directly adjacent to the daycare center. That's not fighting fair, now is it?
Of course, fighting fair isn't always in the cards for freedom fighters which, if you were to hear it from the mouths of ISIL, they are. Back when the Revolutionary War was being fought over here, there was some loud debate back in England about how those colonists didn't seem to want to follow the conventions of war. Bad sportsmanship, wot? I guess we're just glad that the British Navy back then didn't have access to any Tomahawk missiles.