Indeed, what's your answer, Tom?

If the answer is that most of the population of the Muslim world wants to kill Americans, and is willing to die and see their children's future ruined in order to do so, then we truly have no option but war and might as well get on with the inevitable outcome of extermination.

If the answer is that a dozen guys think that way, then I think you too would agree that invasion, let alone strategic nuclear bombing, would not only be wrong in a moral sense, but quite possibly counterproductive. Vaporizing a city to kill a gang might well earn you more enemies than you eliminated.

Had Britain unilaterally gassed every inhabitant of Munich in 1928 in order to kill Adolf Hitler, they probably would have found themselves in a war with Germany eventually anyway -- with the U.S. and many others rooting for the Germans against those dastardly and murderous Brits.

Quite different from the situation in 1944. Perhaps firebombing cities wasn't helpful enough to be worth the civilian deaths, but at a basic level most Germans were still willing to serve in the Wehrmacht and obey orders, and to show up for work in war industries. Defeating German society was clearly necessary.

What makes this situation complicated is that it's somewhere in between.

If 1% of the Muslim world is willing to actively work to hurt us, that warrants action. But if in getting rid of that 1%, we cause 2% to change the minds and now actively seek to harm us, we haven't really accomplished anything. Especially if we might have actually won some over to our side with a different (i.e., more "soft power") approach.

Is it a given that a "hard" approach will create new bad guys more rapidly than it kills the existing ones? No, it isn't, but neither is it a given that the hard approach is optimal either. It's an empricial question.

I've had the chance to discuss this with a variety of academic, military, and intelligence analysts who study islamic extremism in addition to reading published works, and a solid majority believe that Iraq has been counterproductive. Not that they disagree with a "war" view against al-Q and related groups. In that sense they'd be with Tom, and they argue that the Afghan invasion was a huge and successful blow. Iraq, on the other hand, is killing some cannon fodder jihadis but slower than new ones are being radicalized, and more imporantly, it has made much larger swaths of Muslim society more sympathetic to the jihadis and less to the West. In Mao's terms, it expanded the sea that the militants can hide in. Not a unanimous view, but clearly the majority of analysts see the numbers that way.