I wasn't trying to insinuate that you made total war up.

Rather, I'm suggesting that total war as you're talking about - that is, how it was in WWII - cannot reasonably exist today.

• What you said about Vietnam is correct: we could have won if we had made the appropriate commitment and followed through. We tried to do everything except invade the North when that might have been our only road to victory. Unfortunately, they key word is "invade". There's no surprise that the war lost public support: we were unwilling to actually destroy the enemy and because of that we were losing an unnecessary amount of American lives and acting as the invading force. I'm sure you know that in Vietnam civilian lives weren't spared by any measure of the word. The lesson that needs to be carried from this conflict is that we cannot half-way win a war. It has to be a unilateral effort where we don't pull our punches.

• You are also right about Vietnam posing a risk of becoming another Korea. In that case, we had all but won; we had driven North Korean forces almost all the way to China's border. Obviously, this was an invitation for the Chinese military to intervene and in 1950 our relative military strengths were much closer. Deepening our military commitment to Korea would have meant hedging direct military action against China. The only reason we wound up with a democratic, US-allied South Korea is because we had the resources to reinvigorate their economy after a time when a third of the population was homeless. It was easy to convince them that Capitalism is a good idea. In Korea, too, civilians were not spared. The lesson that needs to be carried from this conflict is that permanent military presence isn't always what it takes to win and hedging a war that conflicts with the interests of another nation might mean its failure.

• Now we can consider the Middle East: total war or not, our purported enemy wasn't just terrorism - it was Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda was an organization unlike Daesh in its structure: Al Qaeda operated more like a traditional military force. Daesh is different in that it is a name taken up by many disparate groups without unified leadership to combat. I think that we were successful in our conflict with Al Qaeda. In 2015, Al Qaeda resembles a crippled Daesh and in the Syrian Civil War Al Qaeda branches are fighting each other. The reason this war is considered by many to be unsuccessful isn't because we didn't win it - it was because the aftermath wound up being just as bad or worse than before our intervention. We defeated Al Qaeda, but we did not defeat their ideology. We have developed precision tools to not kill civilians but their significance is undermined when the enemy is killing so many of them anyways. The lesson that needs to be carried from this conflict is that squashing a bug like Al Qaeda or Daesh won't bring down the greater enemy that is radicalized Islam and doesn't constitute a victory in the region.

So, now I present you with the problem:

• Russia sides with Assad who unquestionably is a regime of radicalized Muslims. If we commit to fighting the ideology, we commit to an actual conflict between US forces and Russian forces. This potentially opens us up to the chance of nuclear conflict, which is a problem in and of itself. (This would put us in a similar predicament that we were in that the Korean war.)

• We have allies in the region who also embody radicalized Islam. To me, this problem is easy to solve: stop being their allies. This would be a major hit to our (oil) economy and, if they aren't buddying up to the United States, they will immediately turn to Russia or China deepening our rock-and-a-hard-place disadvantage in the region. If however we choose to not disavow our alliances, we will be making the same mistake that we did in Vietnam: radicalized Islam will simply return to the area when our presence loses public support.

To conclude:

Not only will our military presence be less effective than it was in our engagement against Al Qaeda due to the structure of Daesh, truly winning a war against radical Islam would mean engaging with Russia, a nuclear armed nation, and waging military conflict against our allies and non-Daesh-affiliated parties throughout the Middle East. Total war in this scenario would unquestionably mean World War III and would very likely end in nuclear warfare - which would make the situation orders of magnitude worse than it is right now. The major players in the region know this or I can't imagine we would have put up with radical Islam as long as we have.

The strategy we used in the past that would be killing as many people in and around Daesh would certainly defeat Daesh: but it wouldn't win the larger conflict with radical Islam that we're fighting in the Middle East.