How to Beat Islamic State

This was posted elsewhere on RP, and I think that it is instructive:

http://www.newenglishreview.org/Nicolai_Sennels/Muslims_and_Westerners%3A__The_Psychological_Differences/

We must first know what we are dealing with before we can effectively deal with it.

A couple decades ago a wise young man published a book called "Rhinoceros Success". He rviewed all of the bromides then in fashion: Dress for Success, Get a Degree for Success, Build a Better Vocabulary for Success, etc, etc, etc and then observed that after doing all these things he found himself working for a multi-millionaire who dressed like a slob, was a high school dropout, and cursed like a farmer plowing a rocky field with a mule. After further study he discovered that success was picking a plan, any plan, and driving forward with it regardless of failure until you succeeded. Even the worst plans would succeed, he opined, if you put enough will and effort behind them. Like a rhinoceros who has poor hearing and poor sight and charges in a straight line, never distracted by anything, you too could succeed. It seems that his advice is the only we have yet to follow in diplomacy...

To borrow a line from Starship Troopers, "to defeat the bug, you must first understand the bug."
We must understand what they wish to achieve, and what victory looks like for them. We must also admit that victory for them may be quite different form what we be,wives it to be. We must also admit that they are indeed our enemies. We must also determine if we have the political resolve to fight and defeat them. Like it or not this is an ideological, and potentially generational war, it will not be won by military action alone. [As a reminder we won the military war in Vietnam, but lost the larger more important Political War.]

More intellectual reading on the topic.

https://medium.com/the-bridge/what-would-clausewitz-do-66e22466422c#.zigu04951