[milan]

Killing their families will only make them fight harder.

Possibly, but their families won't be producing anymore terrorists.

All I know is what has worked historically. Bomb their a$$es into the stone age...they are less likely to give you problems; Germany, Japan, and to a small extent at the end of the war, Vietnam. That was the only thing that brought the Vietnamese to the peace table...carpet bombing of cities we avoided for years!

[Eric in the Ozarks]

You are correct. No less than John McCain testified that it was Nixon's bombing of Hanoi that got American POWs released. And the Japanese and Germans had their cities mostly destroyed and families wiped out. They were in no mood to argue with the new sheriff in town.

[berserker]

Odd, but posters are not considering the other obvious option to preventing U.S. casualties: withdrawal all U.S. troops from Iraq. There is no reason to stay and occupy the country - they don't have WMDs and Sadam's government is out of power. Let the Iraqi people fight among themselves and Haliburton over who can run the country, at this point we have no reason to keep 100,000 + troops there for the next few years.