Jordan pilot hostage Moaz al-Kasasbeh 'burned alive'

[Seth]

I think we ought to wait a while and let the rest of the foreign fighters from all over the world flow into IS territory and then neutron bomb the whole roach motel.

[JimC]

I want them to be tentacled aliens!

[Svartalf]

I want them to be Iranians.

I want them to be Mongolians.

So they'd be the Russans' and the Chinese's problem?

[Warren Dew]

Ground fores are needed for that, besides what the Kurds and Iraqis can muster, but the US can't snap its fingers and make Turkey and others invade.

Sure we could. All we need to do is to provide Turkey with a green light - and air support - to take out Assad while they're at it.

Yeah. Right. Great progress was made with aerial bombing in Vietnam too. I heard that on the news reports on a daily basis for years. It's obviously still working as well as it always did.

I think there are a number of important differences here. North Korea was a real, functioning state, with a lot of logistical support from the USSR and China. ISIS is a wannabe state, trying to exert control by terror in a region where they do not have the complete support that the North Vietnamese government obtained from most of its people. From what I gather, bombing of ISIS transport severely hampered their ability to exert power and expand. Now there are no longer as many clear targets, the ability of the bombing to further degrade them may be limited, but it will still prevent them from easily dominating their territory.

Much as the west wants to deny it, the Islamic State is at least as real as North Vietnam - to which I assume you refer rather than North Korea, with respect to "aerial bombing in Vietnam" - was at the time. The Islamic State probably has stronger support amongst the local populace. They don't have the external support from the Soviet Union and China, true, but they do have an oil export economy that North Vietnam did not.

It's far from clear that the bombing campaign has had any effect at all. The Islamic State expanded rapidly to occupy all the Sunni area in Iraq, then ran into a brick wall when they tried to proceed into Kurdish and Shiite areas, where the population did not support them. That's their natural boundary, and it would take a lot to move it in either direction.

[laklak]

Klingons, that's the ticket.