Solid points; we cannot fight this war because our political sissies are too cowed by the fear of looking cruel or barbaric to the DC cocktail classes.
As contentious as things become on this forum regarding Lincoln, once he found a couple of generals who understood what needed to be done, he did little more than provide strategic direction and left the military do its job. Many insist "times were different then," however, if you merely google "William Sherman Quotes" you'll find a number of things he said regarding his contempt for the journalists of his day, and things that are quite applicable to our contemporary media. If the WOT is the first war of the internet era, and Viet Nam was our first "TV War," the US Civil war was the first "Camera War," and even though photojournalism did not have the immediacy and broad distribution it does today, Matthew Brady and other pioneers in the field provided the public at large with unprecedented access to images from the battlefields.