I can’t possibly say it any better than this. A telling quote:
This war, it will be just like the War on Drugs. It will be potent and effective and our objectives will be clear. The nation had a nasty drug problem and we declared a war on drugs and spent billions over many years and now you can’t buy drugs anymore. It will be just like that.
(that’s sarcasm for the sarcasm impaired 😉
Dave's Place/Metamusing 
Any war on terrorism can only be a perpetual war. Look at the British in Northern Ireland. How can you put an end to conflict based on religious beliefs? Better yet, how can you put an end to a conflict that has perceived notions about another groupd of people. You would have to take all of the children away from the area and educate the conflict out of them. Children from both sides to be exact.
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There was an interesting bit about this on NPR a month or so ago. The gist of it was that in modern times there has been only 1 successful dissolution of a terrorist movement. In the (I think it was) 70’s in Jordan some group opposed the rule of the recently deceased King Hussein and were wreaking havoc. He set his military to stopping the campaign and they used a strategy of taking family members of known terrorists hostage. They would torture them, sometimes kill them, and sometimes put them on the phone with the terrorist ‘turn yourself in or we cut her finger off’ kind of stuff, which they would actually do. In other words, they were extradorinarily brutal…..yet effective. The terrorist ring was broken up over the course of a couple of years as a result. The commentator questioned whether americans would be willing to stoop to methods such as these to succeed. My questions is….would you?
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