We carpet bombed Dresden, Berlin and almost all the German cities to destroy their war making power. We nuked Nagasaki and Hiroshima and fire bombed Tokyo to do the same and send them a message that their time had come. We must take out the Muzzies in the M.E. by destroying their oil infrastructure, ports, road systems and if necessary turn a couple of their cities to glass. This isn’t a game of stick ball. This is a friggin’ WAAAAR! Only one side can win. Which will it be? JMHO!
“For many reasons, the commitment that would be required to fully extirpate the organization is not worth the cost, and it’s better not to fight at all than to fight a half-assed or quarter-assed battle.”
Well, you know the great thing is, we’ve got all these nukes just gathering dust, and we’ve already paid for them.
A good next step would be to choose a country such as Syria and colonize it totally, forcing the conversion of its whole population to either Judaeism or Christianity. It does not matter, really which religion except it should be that of a near neighbor or of the conqueror.
Conversion doesn't really convert the converted population but succeeding generations will be less and less secret Moslems. It is hard to retain a faith through generations of banning. Look at Spain. Some Spanish and SW American Spanish descendants retain some vaguely Jewish and/or Moslem traditions and practices but they are not Jewish or Moslem. Moslems and Jews got forcibly converted in episodes as the Reconquista proceeded until 1492. Insulated Christians, many here on FR, are totally aghast at such a suggestion. But the point of the conversion is not to make anybody Christian. It is to stop them being Moslem.
Do these things and Islam will relapse into the torpor that characterized it from sometime during the decline of the Ottoman Empire until the late 20th century when oil revenue and Western gifts provided the resources for Jihad revivivus.
I at least to some extent disagree. We should at the very least give Assad regular targeting updates, and when he requests and our intel supports the requst, we should strike ISIS on his territory. Assad is a brutal, anti-western thug, but he’s a reasonably stable thug. We are better off with him than with ISIS.
“or threaten American interests”
There’s the rub, for what aren’t we interested in? What would you say to someone who said world peace is in our interest? In that case you could advocate a One World State and still be Jacksonian.