Argh! Michael Steele just said (on All In) that we could be fighting ISIS for the next 30 years.

[jwirr]

42. It just dawned on me that maybe we should only send our rw christians who are also trying to

force the apocalypse to fight them. Solve two problems at once.

I watched both Chris Matthews, Chris Hayes and Lawrence O'Donnell last night and we have aproblem. One of the women on Last Word (I think) was talking about bombing. She basically said that we can bomb the extremist but we cannot bomb the idea behind the extremism. I agree with her. Years ago Tom Paxton had a song about this in which he told us that we could not put the idea back into the box.

In other words its like thinking that WWII ended the idea of Nazism or that the fall of the USSR ended the idea of communism or that defeating the Rs ended the idea of trickle down. We need to figure out how to fight the idea because that is our problem.

In the case of ISIS we need to ask the question how can their idea of apocalypse be defeated. I think that will have to come from people who are not seen as the enemy - the USA. The war merely adds to their hatred and as others have said is the best recruitment tool they have.

The problem with all of this is that our US government does not understand that for once we have come up against an idea and we do not know how to confront it. It cannot be solved by military action. We do not know what to do and all those MSNBC programs last night (except Chris Matthews) were trying to explore this idea.