Sketcher,
Like probably most people you would prefer to address the symptoms of the "disease" rather than the "disease" itself. The disease is the unspeakable evil that is being perpetrated by evil people in the Middle East. For the past 8 years Barack Obama has maintained a policy of doing little or nothing to address evil and the evil doers. Indeed, he secretly has an agenda to foster as much unrest and terrorism in the world as possible, since he has done his utmost to give Iran every advantage, knowing full well that terrorism worldwide is being supported heavily by Iran. He has also done his utmost to foster lawlessness within the USA and create social and political unrest. That is all part of his Marxist-Socialist agenda.
At the same time the Europeans have stood by and watched the evil progressing day by day and done ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. This is all similar to Hitler and his Nazis perpetrating all kinds of atrocities throughout Europe while the world stood by and did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. If the evil doers were eliminated, there would be no refugee problem. But no, we want to talk about the poor refugees instead of those evil men who have created havoc and created refugees.
If the disease itself is the evil that is being perpetrated by evil people in the Middle East, and if eliminating the disease is the goal, then there are some points to consider.
The evil that is being perpetuated isn't just the sacking of villages, the killing of men and boys, and the enslavement and rape of women. It's the second-tier status of many Christians. You can't openly and freely preach Christianity and distribute Scripture in most places of that region. In Saudi Arabia, you cannot go to church at all, even if you are a foreigner. In Egypt, the kidnapping of Christians and swordpoint conversions have actually been a matter of
debate in recent years
. And there are many Muslims who might not be involved with Al Qaida or ISIS or similar groups, but who are notionally OK with this. So the war criminals of ISIS do not have a complete monopoly on the evil of the region. But if even we just reduce this back to the militants themselves for a second, they are connected to other people by tribal affiliation, and by religion. There are blood feuds that are years old, perhaps decades old, and perhaps centuries old, that cause Muslims to kill other Muslims. And while interpretations of Islam vary, there are many Muslims who are not militants, Islam is a very paranoid religion and way of thinking. The Rashidun Caliphate's wars of conquest were claimed to be defensive, after all. What this looks like today is the Muslims who are being radicalized perceive attacks on Muslim communities by non-Muslims as attacks on Islam itself. An example of this is when America went into Iraq in 2002, Al Qaida was able to exploit that, increase support and recruitment, and move their terrorists into the country. Hence, attacks on radicals have been shown to bring non-radicals to radicalization.
What all that means is that if you are going to wipe out evil Muslims on their home territory, more Muslims will be drawn into the fight for reasons of faith, and other members of the tribe will be drawn into the fight to avenge their dead tribesman. Therefore, killing them piecemeal will not be an effective solution - you have to kill on the scale of millions. It helps to do that as quickly as possible to avoid a drawn-out campaign that saps more and more human and material resources. And on that scale, it is not possible to ensure that the Christians and Jews and Yazidis and Druze and whatever other minorities will not also be victims of that destruction. If we want them to even have a chance, they should be evacuated from the kill zone first. Then you're free to drop as many conventional, biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons as you please without defeating what I assume is the purpose of the whole crusade to begin with. Oil prices would skyrocket of course, for how long depends on what kind of ordinance is dropped on the oil-rich areas. And assuming you do not mind exposing Western troops to fallout, viruses, or deadly chemicals, you can just have them wipe out what's left. Germany experimented with efficient means of doing so during Operation Barbarossa; they found that the
Einsatzgruppen (units deployed to clear newly conquered areas of undesirables) had serious morale problems and it was just more efficient to stuff their victims into trains and send them to camps where they could be worked to death or gassed.
So if a human ruler or coalition of rulers had the power, resources, and will to complete all this, how could history look upon them as moral? If this were to be done in the name of Christianity, how would murder on this scale not blacken the faith's reputation until Christ's coming? This would be a Crusade on steroids after all. And unbelievers still won't let the church live down any of the past Crusades, even though they were roughly a thousand years ago. Furthermore, how is it at all compatible with the Great Commission? Last I checked, our mandate was to lead them to repentance so that they could go to Heaven, not cut their lives off to ensure that they go to Hell.
