This approach may well produce never-ending war. "There is no longer the need to blow up an entire city when only a handful of buildings harbor the enemy."
Exactly my thoughts.
Firstly, the US is not "blowing up the entire city", and has not in the most recent conflicts ever since the push towards tactical missle and precision bombing strikes.
The enemy knows that we along with Israel try to target precisely, which is why groups like Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda specifically launch rockets, plan, and hideout from civilian homes.
All of the whining by the international community about civilian deaths due to precision strikes, however regrettable they are, is empty rhetoric when one considers what our true capabilities are.
Plain and simple, we "could" fire up those good ol' B-52s and carpet bomb cities to target enemies, but we do not, because for all of the neo-communist and jihadi whining, they know deep down that if we wished, we could obliterate whole societies and countries in our zeal to target terrorists.
There is NOT an everlasting fount of islamic radicals being born who will grow up to hate. Cultures have been forced to change their views through force from other cultures plenty of times throughout world history.
Our benevolence is both our greatest strength and our greatest weakness.
This approach may well produce never-ending war. "There is no longer the need to blow up an entire city when only a handful of buildings harbor the enemy."
And we are thankful that our fathers and grandfathers had more sense than to attemp this half-assed appoach with Germany and Japan or we would still be fighting.