Quote Originally Posted by Vincent Butler View Post
War is not a pleasant thing. You win wars by killing people. That is never pleasant. But I think of the saying "We make war that we may live in peace" and again "The object of war is peace". The problem we had in Iraq, the West tries to be nice in war now. That would never have defeated Hitler and Tojo. Can you imagine if you had had today's furor over civilian casualties back then? England would be speaking German. Human nature being what it is, we will never eliminate war. If anyone has heard of the Kellogg-Bryant pact, it supposedly outlawed war. Eleven years later, Germany invaded Poland. What did Sun Tzu say, "In peace, prepare for war. In war, prepare for peace." The way I look at this situation is, if we don't fight them in their home, we will eventually fight them in our homes. How many more lives will be lost before we go into Iraq again, or worse, how many American (European, African) lives will be lost at home because we don't act? ISIS needs to be wiped off the earth. There is no place on earth for groups like that. We should use them to colonize Jupiter.
While IS should be wiped out, it seems they have enough enemies to do so. Aside from possibly Qatar, they don't have a single state ally in the world. Just about all their neighbors are at war with them. Already, Iraq is reclaiming some cities. I don't see why the US even needs to have any involvement beyond a few air strikes here and there.

Quote Originally Posted by Pannonian View Post
And you keep missing my point. Whether we knew what they were up to, and they us, we both were in agreement on how we talked with each other. We maintained diplomatic relations with each other at all times, and there was no fear that our diplomats would end up dead just because they were our people. That's the bare minimum of understanding the other side. If you have that, there is scope for expanding from there. If you don't have that, nothing at all is possible. We don't have that with the middle eastern loons.
On the other hand, the middle eastern loons have no capacity to bomb us back to the stone age. At absolute worst, they might nuke a city which would be bad. However, the chances of that happening are slim to none and it still wouldn't be as bad as what Putin could do if he really wanted to do so.