And the Muslims that don't want to participate are lumped into the same camp as their "Crusader" enemies.

But too many Americans insist on seeing this as a "clash-of civilizations" scenario, which is exactly how ISIS wants us to react. Most Muslims are just as bewildered by this ISIS phenomenon as we are, but as we seem determined to attack Muslims in general, and that feeds directly into the ISIS narrative.

If we carpet bomb or even nuke Raqqa (a half-million non-ISIS Muslims live there)we will not decapitate the movement, it will just allow them to say "See, the Christian world has declared war on all of us, all Muslims must unite to fight against them." Far from being defeated, the movement will metastasize, it would be like trying to put out a gasoline fire by using a fire hose, burning fuel floats on water. What we need to do is starve it of oxygen.

It must be isolated, starved of resources, militarily crippled with point attacks and then systematically dismantled. But those who do the dismantling must be Muslims. If we go in with a couple of hundred thousand troops and flatten them they'll just be able to say "See, we told you so." And the cult will rise again somewhere else under some other name. We can't kill them all, and we can't occupy the middle east forever.

Read Herbert's "Dune". Its the closest thing we've got to a model of what is going on there. Maybe the Empire and its Sardaukar can defeat the Fremen, but it can never occupy Arrakis.