I put other because it's a very fluid situation with lots of factors that not everyone will agree upon.
Right now I'm against further armed forced on the ground because if that goes sideways which is almost a given in the M.E. these days President Obama will have just given his political opponents a baseball bat to bludgeon him which like a bad re-enactment of this famous movie scene.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy3MtznDeqg&t=1m38s
or this one
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isVwqPyxLM8
For little or no gain at all.
I'm cynical enough to believe that commentators who are cheering on a deployment of ground troops are twice as eager to pull the knives out if it goes bad (again almost a given in the M.E.)
So another scene comes to mind
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FvgP5hO99o
The only thing that would make that scene more appropriate to is if some wag superimposed the faces fox news commentators on the people with knives.
Never mind the fact that the roots of this situation definitely occurred more than 6 years ago and it's easily arguable at least decades ago.
Right now I believe that the Kurdish forces are able to defeat IS with air support that destroys the artillery and armored transport that IS employs.
The difficult part of the situation is the ability of IS to hide in cities and their ability to sell oil on the blackmarket that undercuts the official price.
This allows them to do things like repair the utilities of cities they occupy to a state that is usually better than what had been the norm before they arrived.
There was a person who probably would have been willing and able to keep an organization like IS out of Iraq.... but oh well, he was no longer convenient to keep around.
As for Syria Assad is supposedly now worried about IS who he tolerated because they were fighting the rebels who wanted to overthrow Assad. The brutality of IS has reportedly given Assad second thoughts.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...ign-against-militant-strongholds-9679480.html
As a result he may be willing to deal with the west and may be willing to look the other way and not complain if there are U.S. air strikes upon IS within Syrian borders
As for people traveling to the area from the west. Put flags on people's passports who travel to the area and when they return have people who actually know how to interrogate possible terrorists (like Israeli trained security experts) to see if they are a threat.
If we do invade then don't keep the costs off the books (as was done previously) it is necessary implement a War tax on gasoline to remind people one of the major reasons why the west is involved in the area as well as keeping the debt that certain politicians are oh so worried about from really ballooning.
If politicians are unwilling to pay for the war after running the ones started in the past decade on the national credit card then they should sit down and shut the fuck up about the debt.
TLDR:
Keep the current situation Air Strikes in support of groups fighting IS. Don't escalate just because you want to look tough, do it because previous steps haven't been fruitful.
The West still has the option of arming certain groups like the Kurds who don't seem likely to turn into religious fundies before another invasion.
Because there is already a modern day example of unintended consequences in the M.E. and IS and the current worries are those consequences.
....
I think the best option is to support local troops with airstrikes. Local troops may have the wherewithal to do the needful to drive them out.
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