&gt;(See also Every Terrorist Ever, with the exception of the ones who want to provoke angry retaliation.)<p>I don&#x27;t pretend to know what a terrorist&#x27;s goals are, but my observation, as a US civilian is that our responses to terror have harmed us a whole lot more than the terror attacks themselves, so assuming that a terrorist&#x27;s goal is to maximize damage to my country, it would be rational for them to focus not on how many people they kill, but on how big and self-destructive of a response they can provoke.<p>(the counter-argument, of course, is that I don&#x27;t know how many terror attacks would have happened <i>without</i> our massive reaction.)