The fiends leading the assault against Western civilization will not ever be persuaded to lay down their arms, therefore, they'll probably have to be eliminated by force.
However, the deluded, ignorant souls that flock to their cause need to be confronted through multiple channels, most of them not involving direct military confrontation, if only because that would exhaust our nation's resources.
True, the Confederacy did not surrender because they wholeheartedly embraced the vision of a centralized, industrialized union of states, answerable to a congress seated in Washington. However, that does not mean that there were an equal number of people who supported the cause of secession at the conclusion of The Civil War as there were at the onset of hostilities.
The same rule can applied to WWI, WWII, and almost every other major conflict of the past century. While the main component of people's disillusionment with their original cause came from suffering a succession of debilitating military losses-and the fear that worse was to come-a good deal of their depletion in morale had to do with their opponent's resiliency and the efforts made to communicate that sense of resilience to their enemies.
I realize that propaganda does not win wars isolated from other influential factors, but this professor's supposition that our victory in the Cold War had nothing to do with propaganda is simply preposterous.
However, the deluded, ignorant souls that flock to their cause need to be confronted through multiple channels, most of them not involving direct military confrontation, if only because that would exhaust our nation's resources.
BINGO!! We have a winner!
Very well put.