It worked with the Japanese. :know: As a side benefit it might reduce global warming as well. Better than the rest of the world getting the idea that nuking the USA is the solution to global warming.

It's pretty clear that there are no civilians. So I guess the answer is as few as possible to get the job done. There was a time when we got the job done, now it seems like wars are just a reason to keep the military industrial complex running. No need to finish one, let alone win one.

So you advocate killing Muslim women and children?

So the solution is to nuke the region 6500 miles west of the middle east :hmmm:

What an astounding piece of reasoning. Do they have a Nobel Prize for bigotry?

We all know it's just a matter of time until we're back in Iraq in force. Eventually some nation will get hit hard by a terrorist attack or the smaller attacks will keep happening until we've had enough. Instead of all the pussy footing around, we need a president that says to the military, take the gloves off and get the job done.

It all goes back to why I was against the Iraq war to start with. It does take a radical dictator like Saddam to run and control a nation like Iraq.

The President who signs the order to put troops back into Iraq might as well use the same pen to write his resignation letter. Heck, maybe Obama can do it on the day before he leaves office.
People think of Iraq, they think of coffins with American flags on them, they think of over a decade of car bombs, suicide bombers, IEDs, and they look at the complete mess that the original invasion made.
It would take someone who is a real smooth-talker to be able to convince the American public that they need to put forces back into Iraq, either that or another 9/11. :dead:

If only the world where truly so black and white. First the war on terror is a counterinsurgency a form of warfare that is exceedingly difficult to fight. Its not like WWII where you have a nation state who's industrial capacity can be destroyed.

What precisely is "the job"?

The last president that thought the mission was accomplished some years ago obviously had little idea of what "the job" was. I've seen noone come up with a satisfactory answer to the question for Iraq, Syria or Afghanistan, nor prior to that Vietnam and even as far back as Korea.

I don't expect we'll see a president who knows the answer in my lifetime.

Forget Iraq. As an artificial nation state held together by Baathist barbed wire, it lasted a long time, but I think it's broken beyond salvage. Same goes for Syria at this point. All the king's horse and all the king's men can't put the Sykes-Picot map lines back together again.

If the West truly wants to help the Middle East get out of it's perpetual funk, it might be wise to start embracing fragmentation to the point of recognizing new sustainable states out of the old ones. I think putting increasing numbers of US troops there to keep the fiction of Iraq going, just likely means watching the rise of the Sons of Isis when we go weary and leave, or being on attritional garrison duty there forever.

Not if we get hit hard with a big terrorist attack like Armistead said.

We could not allow isil to conduct attacks upon our country with impunity so there would have to be a very strong response and if Iraq is where we can hurt them back the most then that's we will go.

What I think the American people won't abide this time is any subsequent nation building that causes to drag our feet in leaving after the job is done.

:03:

I think a big re-evaluation needs to be done of who we're allied with there and why we are. There's a big power struggle going on between Iran and Saudi Arabia in which Yemen and to a not-unreasonable extent Iraq, is the battlefield. Israel is a big complication thrown into the mix and that's only going to add petrol to the fire.

In a way, I suppose it's like trying to figure out where to stand in the middle of a city of fragile skyscrapers during a 9.0 earthquake...

It's facing the truth about Islam, the last religion living in the dark ages and causing chaos in the world. Even so called moderate Islam is dangerous for the civilized world. Radical Islam has to be destroyed and it will take a world effort and yes, a lot of innocent people will die, but more are dying under Islam as it is.

We will be back sooner or later. We've grown to accept the constant terror attacks, but eventually they'll pull off another big one. Just time to divide Iraq up in pie. The only way you'll ever get the ME out of the dark ages, is to not only make war so terrible they won't want it again for 100 years, but to run the nations and reindoctrinate these people out of the dark ages. It could be done with freedom of the press, civil rights and secular govt that supports equal rights over a long period of time, but take a world effort, meaning, not gonna happen.

I think for the most part the world has accepted and don't care that Muslims war and kill each other by the millions as they do, but they too often step out in big acts of terror and wmds have to be a big concern of the future.

Hell, this is a video of our ally SA rendering justice on some helpless woman. It just shows you how sick this religion is.

http://www.israelvideonetwork.com/wo...-police-watch/

Well exactly. A coalition large and powerful enough to defeat Islamic State will be a ramshackle disaster that's one major diplomatic incident away from bursting at the seams. The US is already in a bind, having to chose between practical necessity and the luxury of being morally uprighteous. For example, having to choose between arming the good kind of Syrian rebels at the risk of arming the bad kind. Or deciding to work with an Egyptian government that came to power in a coup against a supposedly democratically elected one that everyone was afraid of because it was Islamic.

Although the people who look fondly on WWII like to cast it as a black and white proposition, there was actually something of a debate in Washington and London over backing Joseph Stalin. The problem many folks realized, is that if you join up with a murderous mustachioed totalitarian to defeat a murderous mustachioed totalitarian is that you end up subsidizing a murderous mustachioed totalitarian, Sure, the Nazis were pounded flat, and the Russians did most of the dying, but the winning Allies ended up in an eyeball to eyeball staring contest that parked civilization on the edge of an abyss for half a century. What will the blow back be this time?

And when you scale up such a contest to 2015 standards in terms of population, destructive power of weaponry, environmental consequences, oil disruption, the fact that Muslims currently make up about 23.4 % of the people living on this planet, I don't see how civilization survives.