Removing Saddam was not necessarally a terrible thing. Eliminating the Baathist (sp?) party was a very poor decisions and left the country without a way to effectively maintain control. Eliminating the army just left a bunch of Iraqis anrgy, without work, and with weapons... If the process of effective nation building had actually been executed Iraq may have turned into a functioning country. Unlikely, but maybe. ISIS is a nasty group of militants that have learned exactly how to use terror, crime, and intimidation to force all around them to join them or die. I agree that they need to be eliminated, but I don't think US troops need to be on the ground again (Other than SOCOM and black). This group is not under the Geneva convention, or any other real set of rules. If we are going to remove this group, we need to do it the right way: Low yeild tactical nuclear weapons. They have done us a favor by removing anyone not friendly to their cause from anywhere they are, so we don't even have to worry about RoE and collateral damage. Liquify 30,000 terrorists and their supporters, specfically targeting a major CnC region, and you eliminate a major leadership resource. A juicy secondary target would be logistics and supply locations. The key thing is no hesitation. We go all in: no warnings and no pussyfooting around. We send a message that we (The US) is done tolerating this, the gloves are off, and we will kill you and everyone around you. At the same time we coordinate strikes from Kurdish and Iraqi forces to swing in after the detonation and eliminate any survivors with no quarter. Should get most of them, and the rest should scatter or be significatly weakened. Militant and muslim groups might hate us more for it, but who cares? We will have eliminated a threat in a quick and effective manner with minimal friendly casualties, all while broadcasting a nice deterrance message. We also will have regained control of the oil regions, which is always economically beneficial. Our allies will bitch and moan about the use of nuclear arms, but that is all they will do. No nation really has the balls to attack anyone else anymore over something that isn't directly threatening them. So let's go wave our dick around again, but without getting troops killed/wounded this time. Oh yea, some infrastructure and policital building needs to happen afterwords, which we should monitor, but if we do it all for them, it all will fall apart as soon as we turn control over...