But is he actually keeping us out of ground wars or just delaying the inevitable?
Not dying is “just delaying the inevitable”.
So you admit that ground war is inevitable?
When do you plan to go to the recruiting office and sign up? Or are you satisfied to demand that others do the dying for you?
So far he’s just keeping us out. Wars of choice are never inevitable.
Once we’re attacked in the homeland, it’s as much a war of choice as Pearl Harbor.
Yes, if we’re attacked militarily by a state, then war has been declared (formally or not) and we’re at war which can require ground troops. If we’re attacked by terrorists in a terrorist operation from a non-state actor, then we’re not at war, and ground troops are not required, and any invasion is a war of choice.
Who knew that Japan could have avoided war simply by dissolving their government?
If they had attacked us, then dissolved their government (which includes their military), then that would have probably been effectively a surrender. So yes, this would have been an effective tactic at ending the war.
No, they just tell their commanders to act autonomously. So instead of being attacked bY Japan, we’ve been attacked by Yamamoto.
Of course this is all ridiculous. An armed attack is an armed attack and you go to war to put an end to those who ordered the attack. There is no attack on the United States that ends with us just throwing our hands up in the air and saying there’s nothing more we can do, it’s a criminal problem, not a military problem.
ISIS has 30K to 200K men under arms. I’m not aware of any organized crime syndicates that large. And yes, the Democrats are doomed, because instead of trying to solve our problems they are making excuses about how it’s just so complicated and what can we do?
Who says there’s nothing we can do? There’s plenty we can do. But ground troops just make things worse and weaken America when there’s not a real country that attacked us militarily to fight.
If any Democrats besides the fantasy straw-men in your head were doing this, then they might be doomed. “No ground troops” is not “what can we do?”.
I blame medical improvements for the insistence by many Republicans that they don’t die. Cutting back on Medicare will help speed the collapse.
Hell, 'round these parts not getting Election Day off reduces neither the productivity of city workers nor the number of times they vote. 
Lucky, lucky Addy, at last you have an issue! Fear and loathing for a bunch of raggedy-assed widows and orphans, and war! No wonder you’re so happy!
Democrat trounces David Vitter in runoff election to become Louisiana governor.
A Democrat wins a governorship in the deep south; now, which party was imploding again?
The winner sports a (D) but he’s just to the left of Otto von Bismarck.
You have it backwards. What he’s actually doing is avoiding the unnecessary. The policy you propose just hastens the avoidable.
ISIS is in a fundamentally precarious strategic position, with an unsustainable economy surrounded by deeply hostile neighbors more powerful than they are; they have no allies; and their methods are anathema to building internal legitimacy. The bombing campaign may be hastening their demise. Ground invasion would hasten it more, but at orders of magnitude greater cost. Rather than bowing to political expediency, Obama is showing extraordinary leadership by keeping ISIS in reasonable perspective and recognizing that a ground invasion is unnecessary, however much it would help him personally.
Indeed, do you have any appreciation of the enormous political pressure on Obama to escalate the “war on ISIS” to the use of ground troops, and the total lack of near-term political downside to him doing so? Obama has only 14 months in office. That’s plenty of time to prevail against ISIS in a conventional war, and the public mood right now will tolerate casualties. He gets to go out as a victorious war president. But he would be leaving his successor with the kind of mess Bush left him in Iraq: a fragile, occupation-supported illusion of stability masking an underlying political disaster waiting to burst.
Moreover, we could turn their Indiana-sized hellhole into Gorilla Glass and it would still not solve the (mainly European) problem of why some Western Muslims are prone to radicalization. Unfortunately, the rhetoric of the leading GOP candidates actually exacerbates this particular part of the problem, and in that sense they are effectively in league with ISIS whether they mean to be or not.
You do realize that war has changed significantly since 1945, right?
Your comparison is, quite frankly, awful. Japan was unquestionably acting under a unified banner as a nation. Dissolving the state and telling the commanders to act autonomously would either be a token gesture not worth paying attention to (as the national war machine would continue to fund these “autonomous terrorists”), or completely cripple the Japanese military to the point where they were neither an active threat to us nor to anyone else.
Surprise surprise, ISIS is not the Japanese Military ca. 1945. The situations are so utterly different as to make the comparison completely and totally meaningless.
If there is any lesson we should have learned from the past 15 years, it’s that sometimes, when the US is attacked, the best solution is not going to war. Do you really think we’d be worse off today if we hadn’t gotten stuck in a decade-long conflict in the middle east that cost us greatly in lives, money, and public opinion? Have you learned nothing from Afghanistan or Iraq?
Sometimes, if there is no good solution, “do nothing” is the optimal choice. Or, at the very least, it’s a better solution than a solution which is only going to make things worse. Just throwing soldiers, guns, and bombs at the target? That’s kind of how we got where we are right now. I find it hard to believe that anyone who lived through the last decade and a half could claim that another ground war in the middle east against a terrorist organization is a good idea.
It seems to me that all we’re doing is quibbling over tactics. Not only are we already dropping bombs, but there is also a ground war. We’re just not putting many troops into it. Should we be calling the Kurds and other local forces off, telling them that attacking ISIS on the ground does no good?
The tactics are crucially important. There’s a big difference between an internal power struggle and the great satan sending in another wave of stormtroopers. There’s also, as much as this is gonna make me sound like a dick, a difference between an internal power struggle killing our “allies” in a region where literally nobody is the good guy, and Americans giving their lives in a fight that is almost certainly likely to land us in another huge quagmire.
Actually, no. Degrading them by air and letting time/regional actors do the work of destroying ISIS is one strategy; one I would call aggressive containment. Sending in a massive ground invasion to depose them, occupy their territory, and manage the transition to some reasonably stable and friendly regime is a different strategy.
What we’re quibbling over is strategy, not tactics. You think the latter strategy is inevitable and that Obama is delaying it (even though it’s hurting him politically; something you haven’t explained why he would be doing).